“Poem for Ahmed Al-Jumaili” The shower. The water looks like elongated beads of

“Poem for Ahmed Al-Jumaili” The shower. The water looks like elongated beads of silver each with a band of shifting rainbows at the top. How have I never noticed this? The sun is shining this winter morning, turns water into the briefest art, dying down the drain. 20 days ago it was ISIS and before that, them - or rather, some form of us - twisting tornadoes of smoke and fire into the skies of Iraq. You fled here, like my people did. You took pictures of your first snowfall. Usually seen only when enlarged for official Christian holidays, made of construction paper, the real thing falling now from the Texas sky: frozen microscopic fingerprints. No one knows why they shot you, but there are bullet holes, and there is blood. There are myths about hundreds of words of snow, if you lived your life surrounded by it. Why then is there not a hundred words for bullets, for running into the aiming eyes we are taught are civilized, meant safety- fleeing to this country made of crosshairs. There is not even a dozen headlines about your death, no fluttering of cell phone camera and tiny patter of buttons to ask why, to ask where, to ask what – your murder, like the murder of Deah Bakarat, Yusor Abu-Salha, Razan Abu-Salha, lost quicker than the blink of a slanted eye, tragic news measured by social media ‘likes’. I wish you a flurry of peace. I wish you the slush avalanche’d forth from mourning. I wish you justice, so thick It covers this land all around us. BP, 3-7-2015 Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991, performing for over a decade locally and nationally. His first collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published by Coffee House Press in 2011 to critical acclaim. He is the Program Director at the Loft Literary Center. He is a fiscal year 2015 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. -- source link

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