Valley With No Name

There is a valley behind our home
Way deeper than it looks, that brims with night
Pregnant olive trees and ancient carob segregations,
handmade cages,
My grandma managed to pickle most of its fruit, flowers and birds,
turning what she couldn’t into jams,
selling what she couldn’t stuff into a jar to the neighbor and
cursing the rest.
Everyone else searched for sun kissed houses
On lands elsewhere
As if the stones here got too soft with violence
As if the sun here doesn’t work anymore.
Since I stopped fearing its water, I only felt like swimming
But the summer valley did not welcome me.
Soon more Saturdays will come and
It will be filled again with heads turning
Attending weddings turned funerals turned weddings
Turning into a funeral
With only partial consolation.

Border patrol patrolled the near bakery
Mixing bread and bullets,
Turning sugar into salt,
They stormed the streets named after martyrs,
Stained with sorbet and redemption,
And we started baking our bread with ashes.
“It’s probably better if we sleep during the day,” my aunt said,
with her usual worried eyes
Dark eye circles are known to pass through our family DNA
A gift from the ancestors
Effortless war paint
“If anything happens don’t wake me up,” my mother said
Never stopping her hectic cleaning,
how is that even possible
but I try to let her sleep.
A sound came from the south;
“I just want someone to bury me.”

Heavy rains during a heavenly timed fall
Sprouting hummus ingested with hate—braiding bridges above
The space where words of the three languages I know hang midair
paralyzed
Where my tears hang midface,
paralyzed,
I tried occupying it with something
other than losing
As pain wheelchairs itself in.

According to color theory
We are dying
And statistically speaking
We are being pushed out
Prematurely
Vehemently
out of the tunnels of life
lungs still premature
an entire nation forced into weakened incubators
Fresh out of the womb of history books.

Today our eyes see it all—aired out
On the big screen
Propped up next to the young trifoliate orange tree
On small screens held by wrinkles,
And on medium sized screens my cousins use to learn
The alphabet of the heavy-tongued valley.
What more will come with winter?
The map whispers to me while the bullets bid me good morning.