aftermath.

at eighteen she decided 

she was going to marry 

a boy from benghazi

with scars on his chest

and revolt in his eyes, 

she would trace them

on their wedding night,

fingers moving across lines,

like roads between the cities 

he fought in

he would want a woman with a 

soft body, after the hardness of war, 

something to revel in freedom with,

fingers gripping hips, leaned back against 

windowsill, he would tell her the stories

eyes heavily-lidded and half closed, 

until she begged him to stop.

she was eighteen when she decided

she wanted to marry

a boy from benghazi. 

green book.

i do not need a book

to tell me that i am a woman,

that each month i bleed,

that my body can nourish life,

or that men are not like me. 

i do not need your book

to teach me what freedom is,

or slavery for that matter.

we have already 

tasted both.

your book is burning 

in every street.

and libya is coming for you.

life has always affected me more than death.

i can watch a man die. i cannot watch his daughter cry for him.

rels 2130

my professor has a name i've never heard before. you can't find the meaning on google. no one knows where he's from. he wears bow-ties and has a three-legged dog, and he told us this:

"no one wants to be loved in abstract. really, does anyone want to hear, 'you're my heart and soul - i can't live without you. sort of.'"

bayda to ghadamis.

boy, in jeans and keffiya,

wound tight around neck,

the aircraft can't stop you,

aiming from sky at those above them,

how could they shoot you down?

you have eyes like bomber jets 

and the mouth of a revolution,

you march like free men,

fight like soldiers,

and die like martyrs

brother,

i saw them shoot you down,

through grainy, third party video

on my shiny laptop screen,

the air was cool and i was comfortable,

i saw you bleed, as they dragged you 

towards home, i cried for an hour

imagined your mother, 

young-faced, and grey-haired, 

forced to clean blood

that should've never

been spilled in her lifetime

imagined you clutched to her chest,

"weledi, weledi"

i hear someone in the background say

he was only eighteen

we count shuhood like baby teeth,

and your sister's mouth is almost empty.

you are the face of a revolution,

shrugging off terror, 

i watched you dance under bullets,

the country became free

the day we strangled fear,

leaving her corpse blue and mottled,

at the feet of the regime.

this is a revolution.

ameen. 

bombs over benghazi

it makes me ache that you,

thirteen and long-limbed,

still pale from winter,

had to learn

to wash a body.

please,

don't let me dream of dead girls tonight.