was a rope. A gold band, twisted with smooth knobs. She, and my father, and their mother, and their neighbors, and their village, left behind orchards, the fruit & farm animals, because the occupation became close enough to taste. Natural rope splinters the tongue. Because they remember it, unintentionally, my body aches for it too. It’s not luck, that I sit here, unknowing and aware. Gold would taste delicious. We go back to trees. My father jokes with his sister at dinner. This is a funny story. Laugh. They spent three weeks watching cave walls that protected them shake spit dust every time a bomb dropped. Eventually they got sick of it. My aunt said her mom would rather die on her land, than the dirt hole they escaped to. What stupid pride. The joke is this: because they were gone for so long, they found a feast of chicken eggs and mallow. “Only Palestinians eat grass and call it a meal”—they had eggs a dozen ways that day. We always go back. We leave to return and I think my father bought an orange orchard in america to go home to show us that they’re worth dying for even though he says we won’t ever all travel in the same plane, just in case one crashes. Someone must live to return. I lost my aunt’s ring, in an orchard. She left it behind, we left oranges behind, and I still lost that ring, among fruit that weren’t even ours.
Rema Ghassan Shbaita was acknowledged by The Atlanta Review as the Dan Veach Young Poet of 2019, does not consider dandelions weeds, and is allergic to grass. You can find some of Rema’s work in PacificREVIEW, the Mosaic Art & Lit Journal, with the Inlandia Institute, and in Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry distributed by Haymarket Books.
