—“They are shooting at us… please come take me” from Hind Rajab’s final call to paramedics 
in Gaza, January 29, 2024.

            1

I write this from Los Angeles	
where sirens mean traffic, not war,

where my son folds paper planes in the living room

and asks if clouds can hold weight.
Somewhere across the cracked bowl of the world,

a girl’s voice became the weight

no cloud could carry.

Her voice crackled
through the phone.
Metal hush of a car surrounded by tanks,
335 bullets to kill a family of six.
An efficient and most ethical army.


Hind, they say you were six—

six like the years it takes a tooth to find its memory

in a child’s skull,

six like a dandelion blown and gone

before the seeds had names.	
I saw the photo—

of your face, not yet relinquished—

like a doll’s is when left behind 
on a rush-hour seat.

Your palms curled inward,

like leaves surprised by winter.

A city is a ribcage

crushed under boots and drones.

A car becomes a coffin.

A plea becomes

the echo that eats itself.

You were the echo, Hind.

You were the long syllable of come.

You were the breath before a nation forgot to exhale.

What is a child’s voice against

armored rumble, diplomatic pause?

What is a girl’s body
under aerial logic,

under satellite eyes that blink but do not weep?
What is a child’s voice against
an efficient and most ethical army?	

I saw your name

between headlines and hashtags,	
a flicker in the tide of forgetting.

I saw you in my mind’s painting, Hind,

a child crying not in oil or frame,

but in the unframed flesh of metal and earth.

Your knees, were they drawn up?

Did your body bounce with every bullet shot?
335 bullets to kill a family of six.

I want to believe in something,

but all I have are your words
l
eft on a phone line,

and the snowless air of Los Angeles

buzzing with helicopters,

as if war were something

that only happens elsewhere.