On April 6, 2016, an Iraqi college student flying from L.A. to Oakland was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight after another passenger heard him speaking in Arabic on his cell phone.
An ‘inshallah’ here and there,
some threats sent (and retweeted)
through your (and my) feed:
terror of Muslims — no offense–
causing the wheels to halt, the passengers
to disembark from the plane
in hijabs, thawbs, prayerbeads
clicking, the prophecy scrawled
on a paper napkin:
there, as here, bombs resound
in the market, temple, mosque; then
as now, an ambiguous sin:
sudden death from below or
falling from the sky, here,
there, puffs of sand
mark an absence, an open room
where a wall was, or
a stump for a hand:
so in the devastation
a drone strikes, collateral damage haunts us
in the gloom:
unaware, the satellites zoom
in on the craft, ‘Reaper’
or ‘Predator’ we know not:
we type furiously on our devices;
fighting, arguing
in comment streams — we’ve got
too much to say, we post to our walls
where ‘likes’ proliferate,
hieroglyphs of modern affect;
Iraq has nothing to teach us,
we see ourselves in a funhouse mirror,
slow faces melting in hate,
letting the pressure build until
bile bursts from our fingers
(what people will say online!):
inside, mediated pathos,
outside, the whirl of a virtual floor
throws off our footing
and we scroll down, drunk,
searching for a door
that is not there:
the body was made for
no such long sitting without moving,
yet the eyeballs cling to the screen:
the ass? it has grown numb,
the heart sinks down, dead weight,
joints, muscles atrophied, skin gone sallow,
yet the dream holds:
we share the meme: we wonder
who made it? what for?
*
This poem originally appeared in Dispatches From the Poetry Wars.
