Tosh Sherkat | Issue 31

Poetry | Bisan from the north of Gaza / gives you updates in each video / you watch her nails grow longer, lips / swell with lack of water.

Nail Clippers

(for Bisan)

Bisan from the north of Gaza 
gives you updates in each video 
you watch her nails grow longer, lips
swell with lack of water.
you want to send her a letter
because they say no humanitarian
aid is getting through. you want
to send her a letter with nail
polish and clippers, but no mailman
is driving through the open wound 
as it bleeds
cries from babies under the bombs.
this shape of light
this uncertainty of alarm,
its olive, rising rhyme
as you forget about the stove
on the phone with Bisan,
whose suffering is now homeless.
you watch every day. she is still there.

you want to fly there. you’ll fly to
Jordan, to Cairo, to Beirut, to
Eilat, Tabuk, Tel Aviv
and storm the border with food and water and
your letter and morphine 
for those who are going to die
and deserve that at least gently.
there is no good image for this.
but somewhere in the distance the world is burning
you just can’t see it.
if you don’t know what I mean,
you just can’t see it.
you won’t ma…