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The following is an excerpt of a real journal entry I wrote in July, edited for publication and privacy. It is my attempt to word unspeakable violence, to mould the visceral with a vocabulary built for logic and softness. It is reflection, story, prose poetry, word vomit.
I doomscrolled through videos of Gaza tonight and I think I had a panic attack. I get up to wash the blood off my hands but there is none, just clean fingernails and shame. I don’t make it to the bathroom anyway; I keep spinning through swaths of people down. An empty pot sits atop my head, ringing with hungry cries of children whose names I’ll never know. I bang it with a wooden spoon and hope they know I hear them. The noise makes my head pound and my bedroom spin. White curtains, bones exposed. Yellow dress, jaundiced corpses. Red poster, red everything. My head is in the seat of my desk chair and I’m kneeling, kneeling like I believe in God. I want to believe in God. But the things that make me wish for a God are the things that seem to point to his non-existence: children dying, that is. The last time I found myself on my knees like this, it was before I saw a child die; Before I saw a young life end for no reason but a cluster of malignant bone cells. I know that was prayer because I still had hope, but that was seven years ago. My last drop of faith dried when I saw her mother’s tears. I know this is not prayer. This is vomit. My knees fall not by will but by a buckle, a punch in the stomach, a contraction. This is the excrement of all the pain I have swallowed in scrolling for the past two years, moving onto the next Shien haul and pretending I didn’t just see a baby die. How can I begin to describe what I saw? How thick and bright is blood? How does it shine against the dust that layers the boy’s skin. How can his foot hang by a thread from his ankle, mangled, swinging, his body suspended on the shoulders of his stumbling brothers? That same foot tried on school shoes and kicked footballs and blistered at the heel. How these two things be true? What does the girl see, moments from death? What does she hope to reach while writhing on the floor, her hands waving in the air, to a song, for God, at nothing? I don’t want to write anymore. No words will transfer these images onto a page. I can only write about the softness of the leather on this chair; The firmness of the ground beneath me; The wide door frame; Stained glass. I taught an eight year old girl to spell “elevator” today. Her face was clean, and she had a white bow in her hair and a pink pencil in her tiny hand. The dissonance is too dizzying. The gap is too wide. Words fail me. Language shatters. Poetry is everything is meaningless.
Written by Amy Wake
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