Dr. Maisara Al Rayyes
. . .is dead.
His brothers’ bodies follow him. Three more joined in the stillness after shrapnel flays flesh, live fire rages. A photo bleed washes the screen: stilled babies, crushed by ancestral chance, lie wrapped in winding cloth, readied for earth as death flows like a bankless river through each choking street. Red brick dust coats hospital doors that hang askew, seeking the life savers who could not save themselves. Moayd. Maisara. Mohammed. Each boy, one mother’s son. Newsprint images pin children’s butterfly bodies to a spreading board called Gaza where the wings of all that’s possible are plucked by those who turn the truth away while new bombs carve ghost faces and mothers keen the pangs of each new day. Destruction spreads in piled rubble that human eyes choose to ignore. At evening, listen carefully, siblings of the dead keen the lyrics of sorrow in the vacuum each new morning brings. They stand to voice the mourning songs destined for rebirth with every rising sun.
Precipice
Certain
Wear mourning weeds, silk-thin and winter white; toss funeral herbs to green your muddy grave. They say we die three times. You’ve managed twice. Your sons ward off the third and speak your name.
Tossed funeral herbs to green your muddy grave. I’ve filled Ball jars with words that overflow from all those still alive who speak your name. Each hour yellows, flakes, dissolves like snow.
I’ve filled Ball jars with words that overflow. Wore mourning weeds, silk-thin and winter white but language yellows, too; day turns to night. They say you die three times, and now I know the third’s when lovers die who spoke our names.
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
— David M. Eagleman
Joani Reese is a poetry and flash fiction writer who lives and works as an educator in Texas. Reese has had work published in over 70 online and print journals. She has a hybrid poetry/flash fiction full length book, Night Chorus, and two chapbooks, Dead Letters and Final Notes. Reese has been poetry editor for Connotation Press, THIS Literary Magazine, and general editor for MadHat Lit.