Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Air

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


Pronouns

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.