Two Poems by Mayen Demas MK

[none feels at home at a home grief calls home]

this poem begins where grief
made my heart
its home.
mother birds into the clouds
on the wings
of a bullet-wound.
father morphs into a metaphor
for anything
rinsed of its song. he morphs into a poem
in whose mouth the searched searches
for his search party.
& now i know that i know
that grief is the loss of tongue.
& now i know that i know
that none feels at home at a home
grief calls home.
at mother’s funeral,
a man says
all of us die when one of us dies;
that as one is sunk into earth,
we are sunk into grief.
here, grief is a gospel:
none questions
its interpretation.
this poem begins where i bloom
into a darwish.
i waddle into the night to ask the day to be kind
to my kind.
& like death is sucking palestine out of existence,
grief is sucking joy out of every living in my land.
this poem ends as it begins:
this poem begins
grief made my heart its home.
this poem ends as it begins:
mother birds into the clouds
on the whirring wings of a bullet-wound.
we wait for our own deaths
& our own deaths surely come…
& now i know that i know
grief only leaves us as we leave our bodies:
who knows how else grief leaves?


my editor could not stand my overuse of ampersanda

my editor―mr. origi―
couldn’t stand
my overuse of ampersands
in my poems in place of “ands”
each time he would land his eagle-eyes
on [a & oops sorry] an ampersand,
he would urge me to rid it off;
to molest, mutilate, murder
each and every innocent one of them
lurking in the dark corners of my poems
until the manuscript was shaved clean of them.
& i would shake my head & ask:
isn’t that how
ethnic cleansing work;
to annihilate a people of certain extraction
just because someone in position
likes them not for one reason or the other?




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