Occupation Experiments
Is t
his a b
it of w
hat it means to be occu
pied? Beauty elsewhere.
A t
rack laid out with a deep groove.
And when you love y
our l
and, no p
lace but in the armies of love or hate.
Choose wisely.
But samud—steadfast.
C
leaving the l
and in two, c
leaving to the l
and.
Not an uncommon
occurrence, but usu
ally Procrustes c
hop(e)s off our ungainly
arms and legs embar
r as
sing p
arts hanging off the edge
but it’s an
other thing to never be al
lowed to g
row in
to y
ourself in the first p
lace. A pl
ant writhes and twists
into the s
pace you give it.
Not a straight proud back to the sky, a stem b
ends here and t
here to snatch at a d
apple of sun.
And you, who k
nows who you’d be
if allowed to a
rise without the sky hemmed in by w
alls.
I don’t w
ant to op
press you by pain
ting you as
no
thing
but victims. Do I dishonor you
by fixing my playground, my toy s
old
iers in this fami
liar pattern?
Or is this t
ruth? To com
bat the belfries
of our minds, the old swerve
to b
lame and point fingers
at you again
st me again
st you. The ene
my of my fri
end is my ene
my and the ene
my of my ene
my is my fri
end is a dead
end.
Joy Arbor is the author of the chapbook Where Are You From, Originally? (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Joy is currently working on a collection exploring the tension between being the granddaughter of a captain in Israel’s War of Independence and a human rights advocate who has traveled to the West Bank and listened to the stories of Palestinians living under Occupation. Poems from the collection have been nominated for Best of the Net, anthologized in A Human Voice, and published in Atlanta Review, Pleiades, Scoundrel Time, and others. She lives in Davis, California with her husband and son. https://joyarbor.net/.
