exit wounds
I wasn’t there
when my grandparents
were shuffled, guns to their backs,
into a catastrophe they wouldn’t see the end of.
I wasn’t there
when my father held
a handgun to his temple & pulled
the trigger, loosing the burden of his pain on us.
Exile is an exit wound
as real as a gunshot, as deadly as
a bullet spiraling through bone & flesh,
halting only when metal met brick across the room.
Look at the ballistics
& see the trajectory: My father’s bullet
began not then, but when my grandparents
were forced from their land, exiled into elsewhere.
I was born with holes,
gaping mouths of inheritance
that cannot be plugged or plundered;
only hollowed with what my body can’t unknow.
Follow the dotted line,
the path snipered through the air
to the point of impact, & connect the dots
to the exit wound shaped like diaspora, like America.
Investigate the crime scene
of my ethnicity, of what has been done
to us, & feel the ricochets of decades & loss.
Peel the targets off our backs, lift the boots off our necks.
Arms reaching
through fence holes, between
prison bars—those are exit wounds, too.
A vision of the sea with no way to sail into the deep.
I wasn’t there,
but my blood memory was.
I wasn’t there, but my people were.
We have always lived between riverbank & seashore.
The Rage of the Diaspora
after Noor Hindi’s “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”
I grieve with & for the homeland & her kith & kin: my skin.
I grieve with & for the people on & in the ground.
An occupier says, Free Palestinian flag, six feet under
& I weep for how our flag gets used for shrouds.
I wear my keffiyeh like armor & Docs like military boots.
A man asks, Do you support terrorists? Would you murder me
if I visited my family in Israel? & chafes when I ask the same.
With mandatory military, it’s not if his family has murdered, but who.
I buy coffee, wondering how many have sipped their last
& pay the taxes that will buy rockets to kill my cousins.
There is no ethical consumption under America.
Western media says we “invaded” our own country.
I eat grape leaves, thinking of my teta & the suitcases she brought
to this country for a life broader than border walls.
I google white phosphorus & butterfly bullets.
I read up on international human rights law.
Fuck your theory, your thought exercise, your whataboutism,
your both sides centrist kumbaya naivety, my people are dying.
Like us when we resist as much as when we’re good little victims.
Say land back & mean it. Say decolonize & live it.
I eat caramelized figs from a Palestinian deli straight from the jar
letting the juice thread through my fingers, become
glue on my knuckles, & tendril down my forearms.
Their succulence has never been so sweet.
I begin to think: If they want monsters,
we may as well show them our teeth.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They are the winner of the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, will be released in July 2024 from Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
