palestinians handshake emoji spiders

for jess rizkallah

three times in three days i turned my eyes

to see a spider at the moment it caught and ate a fly.

cook flour and water and you can make flesh.

i wake wrapped in dread next to a father who’s died.

he’s not wrapped in anything. my dream of creaturely fact.

my puppet wrapped in distance and lawflesh.

i wake wrapped in capital. a spider hid the prophet

and kept him safe from harm. how to be lucky

in the time of time and nothing but time meted out variously.

a child in my grandmother’s house my friend the spider.

my daddy long legs who could kill me but couldn’t.

i wish for everybody fullness. let me have a leg inside every world.

to see what could cause me to die and to watch it not

move. i used to whisper to trees and then i stopped. then, later,

i saw a very small spider next to a very large scorpion, both

dead. today is my father’s birthday. i have not seen a spider eat

for several weeks. outside my window there are several spiders a

kinship of them sharing one web. from them i learn violence and homemaking.

jess tells me there’s a metaphor scuttling across her ceiling and that spiders

are not my friends. i’m trying to write a review of the terrible book

about palestine but i can’t. i watched a gust of wind blow

and uproot a bush in the neighbor’s bougie yard on the day i wished

this country would end. i know the world has agency.

wealth makes people evil and so boring i want to puke.

the spiders live in all the corners of the house the places things meet.

the terrible book about palestine keeps calling everything we do

a poem, my dad is a poem, our scars are poems, annexation is a poem,

the land is a poem, etc. i won’t do that to spiders they’re not poems

they’re creatures and they know things. i’ve been hungry and eaten.

i’ve been eaten too. daddy long legs bite like a kiss.

just the idea of a bite and my flesh knows the rest.

i’ve been practicing flying. i’m starting to find the words i need.

i’m starting to know they’ll never work. i don’t have teeth

to speak of. and jess tells me that hope and faith are different.

my dad’s starting to disappear and i’m praying him along. i want

to bless him with the joy of not being known endlessly. i want to wrap

him. the wealth of the writer of the terrible book about palestine

grows, makes nothing happen. of the spiderearth i ask: cocoon me in wind.

uproot me. bite me and get past this skin, my aegis. i wish i could

pretend colonizers were my family but alas: murder, etc.

i don’t know why anyone writes poems that aren’t spells.

most things are performative i’d say. i’ve got maybe seventy dollars

left in my account. performative doesn’t mean fake. i think faith is knowing

there’s a better world and hope is the moments it breaks

through into this one. like a fang piercing my skin. like one of

the strings breaking and puppet flesh spilling out into realness. i don’t know

how to fly. i’m stuck weblike. the earth tells me something

about faith every single moment of every day.

anyone with wealth is incapable of listening and they are so full of blood.

i haven’t seen a spider eat since that week i wished

that this country would die and get drained.

since then i haven’t seen a spider

try to teach me nourishment

means someone needs to get

exsanguinated.