every Palestinian child killed
is someone I will never know
you might say
I wouldn’t know them anyway
because before they’d have grown
I’ll have died, & yet
we might have exchanged
fleeting gusts of air, theirs
blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine
blown there from small town Vermont
they bombed into fragments
picked off by snipers
skin & bones in a mother’s arms
while I slow & slip & sink
& succumb to old age
every you & I, we are the same
Ovid’s creation story is so predictably male —
natus homo est — I expect Ovid saw homo
as a white Roman male, a norm from which
other colors & genders deviate. A priori,
I reject homo & translate Ovid’s phrase as
humans are born, not being snootish enough
to opt for humanity is born, also not quite yet
determined to feminize Ovid, nudge him
toward woman is born — problematic, since
my preferred future is a gender-irrelevant
world where woman is as impertinent as man.
