On Eating a Whole Mango
Stuck in my car,
I grieve the day I became
an immigrant here.
Oh, parking lot country,
this bitter home,
all freeways and strip malls,
drive-through deserts blooming
for our convenient consumption.
All ties severed,
connections undone,
eyes diverted,
so no questions are asked
about who gets to be disappeared
today in the blind spot of empire.
Let’s guzzle down this freedom
all by ourselves,
not sharing,
until it breaks down inside
into a swarm of flies.
I am dishonest,
there is still beauty.
I reach for my phone to post
pictures of my daughter
discovering the world—
the little treasures:
yellowing leaves,
pebbles,
two deer in a field,
a piece of tissue shaped like a bird—
but I learn
a mother in Gaza prolongs her sleep
to avoid her daughter’s hunger cries.
[Let’s be clear: the mother’s name is Nada Jouda.
Trace the Arabic letters: ندى جودة]
Wilting away,
staring at the wall,
Nada’s daughter smiles.
She dreams of eating
a whole mango in heaven,
all for herself,
not sharing.
Between the spoken
and the written,
is she already martyred?
In a private chat,
mothers against genocide
are planning a protest in town.
The poster cradles a tiny baby,
only thin skin and bones and diaper left.
“While you eat and drink
U.S.-backed Israel is doing this.”
I worry the shorthand will backfire.
Your average diner will not devour
the righteous rage of the activist.
At best, he will sample some shame,
maybe indulge in guilt,
surely swallow defensiveness,
sprinkled with some extra hatred
reserved especially
for brown skin.
But, then again, fuck sensibilities,
why not lead with anger?
And what is left to say anyway
on the edge of the abyss?
“All I possess in the presence of death
is pride and fury”
said Mahmoud Darwish.
My screen lights up again:
my daughter ate bell peppers & ranch dip
at daycare,
rejected most though.
What does she know about
manmade starvation in Palestine,
and how some get to conduct their wars?
How do I tell her I birthed her
in this country
on stolen indigenous land
although I had a choice not to?
My baby,
born in the time of genocide,
yet oblivious
and perfectly insulated from it.
I dread the day
she will learn that,
in the grand scheme of things,
some lives are valuable
and others await the slaughter.
Even poetry in this borrowed language
is altered by the all-consuming
private experience,
sealed off from the contaminations
and infections of the other,
from the paradoxes of
complicit witnessing.
Or so the critics will say one day
when the imperial self has unraveled
leaving only scattered ruins behind.
What was there to do but turn away
from catastrophe
and live loudly,
which translated into
gobbling up all the birds,
and the trees,
and the fields,
and the oceans.
Not sharing,
but subsuming these
into the boundless self.
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ALEXANDRA MAGEARU is a writer, scholar, and visual artist, originally from Romania. She is currently based in Cleveland, Ohio, where she teaches in the Writing Program at Case Western Reserve University. Her poems and creative prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Story, Michigan Quarterly Review, World Literature Today, Tint Journal, the other side of hope, Apofenie, and Sundial Magazine. Her academic scholarship in postcolonial and forced migration studies has been published in The Comparatist, Women’s Studies, Border Crossing and in two collections on philosophy.