.elected.day.

It was rather easy to separate the loyal, the faithful,
from the dissenters:
they wore their own yellow stars often,
patterned kuffiyehs like cloth waterfalls.
More importantly, they spoke with a harsh tongue,
as if all their stories and memories were thrashing in their throats
like fish writhing in nets.
And it was rather easy to remove their spines,
filleting muscles from organs, disposing of the heads
as children challenge each other to touch the unseeing eyes.
Their branches were pruned,
to keep the faiths apart
within a people already walled up
like a reversed siege.
The fallen olives were smothered into the dust,
the pits picked out from the treads of the bulldozer,
the oil seeping into the earth.

It's all rather easy when, after all,
God has chosen you.

the hen

potbellied, puffed
up, she pressed against
the wire cage. bizarre
hiccup, each cluck.
her neighbor plucks
its feathers the way
a child strips flowers,
one for love, one
for rejection. the hen
opens her mouth, but for what?
she knows only fear,
only useless wings.