I.
I use google translate to convey English phrases in Arabic sometimes
A client tells me she is depressed
And her father has been having tremors since the war started
But usually when he is doing typically stressful things like dealing with an angry customer or
Fixing that damn light in the bathroom that won’t stop flickering even though the bulb is for sure new

I type in the word “somatic” to try and figure out how to explain the correlation between the brain and the body
And my insides laugh mockingly
Using english to explain the destruction that the they third person pronoun have caused

I think we got the order wrong in grad school
The disease cannot also be the medicine

My people do not understand healing as a clinical hour
This lexicon of pain is not a researched and deliberately punctuated abstract,
it is a slang
And its letters are clear on the back of my grandma’s hands who birthed nine babies and buried some too
and knew to sweep the floors when it got too much and knew to pet the cat when the thoughts were loud
and knew to leave a missed call when the displaced son she hadn’t seen in 30 years crossed her mind for
7th time in 2 days

My people understand this language better
In how my mothers hands sift couscous poetically
Letting the grains slip between her fingers only to pick them up again
Like sand on the shores of her childhood
And in an hourglass

Letting time do its job

Flipping and sifting and tumbling the pain until it felt
Purified

Until nothing made sense but the friction at least eroded its jagged corners enough that the letters stopped looking foreign and tapered into stories of a native tongue

II.
Today they gave me a questionnaire to make sure I didn’t have postpartum depression
“It is protocol for these fragile first months”
The nurse smiled assuringly
And I thought of all the mothers in Gaza who do not gently get asked

If they have been disproportionately worried or hopeless or if they have had bouts of crying
Or if they had been struggling to fall asleep
I thought of these women and felt like I was cheating

Mothers, so many mothers
Robbed of their countries and left to build a nation alone

Tell me how we are supposed to make sense of our own humanity
In words that grew in soil still fermenting with bodies of innocents robbed the same way

Words laden and dragging with a deferred vengeance

They don’t know our grieving in groups and swaying with holy verses
They don’t deserve an explanation of how our tongues express joy

And it is not for us to bear the weight of translation

And I thought about if I was ok, really?
How lately I have been fixated on needing to learn all the 3arabi recipes and understand every herb and
spice and its uses and benefits and ecological origins so my daughter could know them too
How I kept the Quran playing constantly and the Moroccan radio channel on occasion too
Because she heard enough “what”s and “yes”s and “hi”s to last her a lifetime maybe I could give her
enough words in Arabic to last her a day, a conversation, or forever

III.

Today I saw a 7 year old girls neck was slashed by a 73 year old man at a neighborhood park
Yesterday in Rafah, it was limbs and limbs and entrails and limbs
And a newborn baby’s head being stitched up and
Trees and churches as old as newborn Jesus destroyed
And a young boy kissing his dead mother’s feet and
I struggle to remember what else
The images are a blur the images are a blur of red and gray and brown
And I don’t trust anyone to care about my infant daughter’s life anymore
And I don’t know how to rationalize this pain
And I don’t want to
I don’t want these numbers anymore
Clean, progressive, precise,
They are weighing the limbs, did you hear, to estimate the ages of the buried?
But mass does not equal matter, did you not learn that?
These numbers do not properly illustrate this matter
How much they mattered, how much they matter

And how much is lost in these margins?
I don’t want the formulaic grammar
I don’t want equations on the news trying to solve for {x-value} human life and the {y-value} deservedness
to live
I don’t want the guttural Rs and swallowed up Ts
I want to sing exclusively lullabies passed down from my teta and mama and watch exclusively 3arabi
films and read books in flowery fus7a
and watch the news the way my dad did after he came from work with a plate of literal vegetables
munching loudly on a head of lettuce
(I wonder what my father would have preferred to do with his time if he hadn’t had to watch Aljazeera for
so much of it)
I never want to hear my name hardened at a doctor’s office
I want to reach into my throat and break apart those letters rigid and raw and scatter the pieces like
legos and form them into bones to make up for the limbs

This language is dripping in debt
This handover is a desperate reparation
And this is not diaspora poetry
my parents’ migration did not create this wound
it took me all these years to realize that
it was the coming of the colonizer to my lands that set this all into motion

And made the leaving necessary
And made the staying suffocating
And made the leaving a story I would choke on until I spit it up

And returned to say it in my mother tongue