December 2015, Issue #3
EXTINCTION/DEVOTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial
Lise Weil
Kristin Flyntz
I. EXTINCTION
Debra Magpie Earling
From The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Melissa Kwasny
After•Word from Ghost Dance: the Poetics of Loss (Debra Magpie Earling)
Naeemeh Naeemaei
Dreams before Extinction
Deena Metzger
Our Radiant Lives
Mary Sutton
Her Body is Burning
Naomi Shihab Nye
My Grandmother Said
Netanyahu
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Arrest
Sara Wright
Tree Holocaust
Beverly Naidus
Curtain Call: Portable Altars for Grief and Gratitude
Marilyn DuHamel
Turning Point
Susan Cerulean
Bear Requiem
Margo Berdeshevsky
Our Safe Word
II. DEVOTION
Mei Mei Sanford
Serach Bat Asher Speaks
Lise Weil
First, a Mother: Interview with Megan Hollingsworth of
ex•tinc•tion wit•ness
Caroline Casey
Beauty from Brokenness: Interview with Lily Yeh
Sharon English
After•Word Our Call to Indigenous Consciousness: Taiaiake Alfred’s Wasáse
Cynthia Anderson
From the Beginning
Nova
Anne Bergeron
Calling out the Names
Julie Gabrielli
Song of the Chesapeake
Nora Jamieson
I am Nothing without my Dead
Patricia Reis
After•Word Nora Jamieson’s Deranged
Rebecca Brams
The Bone in My Yard: a Story-Carrier’s Path
Lise Weil
Listening to Natural Law: Interview with Ayya Santacitta
Courtney Cable
After•Word Kenny Ausubel’s Dreaming the Future
Cynthia Travis
Offerings
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Arrest
In the middle of all of this
just for a moment
can we stop to talk about the thirteen year old boy’s legs
still covered in thin hairs that have not grown long
enough to be coarse against the soldier’s palms,
their softness unnoticed by the
machine-gun callouses of the soldier’s hands
mangling the slender legs,
stripping them of their cheap jeans,
lifting them like kindling
from the floor of the army jeep,
splaying them apart so that even as he writhes in pain,
his legs battered by the soldier clad in
layers of fibers crafted by modern technology
to protect against weather, flames, the dust
of the earth, even as the Palestinian boy writhes
in pain on the floor, he tries to fold onto himself
as the soldier spreads his matchstick legs apart
an animal fear awakened in the boy of what a predator
might want to crush next,
can we just take a moment
to ask: if this boy somehow
lives, what will his legs have to carry
as they grow and the hair on them
thickens to barbed wire?
what weight will he lift each time he walks?
Notes:
Palestinian children face a profound threat every single day that they live under Israeli military occupation. Soldiers, many of them only a few years away from their own boyhood and steeped in increasingly vitriolic anti-Palestinian rhetoric and deep fear of the other, patrol their neighborhoods, stand by idle or participate as extremist settlers taunt and harass the children on their way to school, and often engage with Palestinian children with ferocious violence. Israeli laws are constantly being changed to allow for the detention by armed soldiers of younger and younger children. Palestinian bodies are under constant threat. This violence is one aspect of an ongoing Nakba that Palestinians have endured for decades, a project of erasure that leaves no human being, olive tree, or square meter of land unscathed.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha - is an American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage. Lena's poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals including Lunch Ticket, Monarch, The Lake for Poetry, The Taos Journal for International Poetry and Art, James Franco Review, Mizna, Borderlands: Texas Review and Sukoon. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, for her poems "Immigrant" (2015) and "Middle Village" (2016). Several of her poems have been anthologized; most recently, her poem "Running Orders," published in Letters to Palestine: American Writers Respond to War and Occupation, by Verso Press and "Seafaring Nocturne," published in Gaza Unsilenced by Just World Books. She is an MFA candidate at Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop. Her first book of poems, Water & Salt, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
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