“Would Daisy disappoint you – no – she wouldn’t – Sir–” –Emily Dickinson, The Master Letters #3
tie a bag around your teeth, what are the contents, what are you carrying, pluck “i am sinking” “not
like any garden” “wilting” Daisy tells me to eat, her insistent agenda with grins, ravenous kisses,
i put my thumb on her, push, her tongue backdown my throat, we watch the dying, blossoms,
the vase begins to brown, the stems grow rot there is such a smell, their water, now dry
but with her hand in mine, we watch, we understand these plants will never eat again, but how,
to softly tell them we are happy, they’ll never believe, these gardens who sit and wait, expending
oxygen to watch us decompose, their next meal, however many years away, but her mouth’s flavor
and the wet of her neck, exposes me, cruelly, to my own dehydration, i feed, drink, the flowers
scream with heat
Shannon Hearn is calling on you, reader, to join them in the essential refusal of and resistance to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Wherever, whoever you are, demand an end to this imperialist violence. This is no war. To witness this devastation in silence is complicity; the loves, the light, the souls lost will remember; we will remember; Gaza will be free.