War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens

By Mohammed El-Kurd

after Audre Lorde

There are many roots.

War machines are coin-operated arcade games,

and your penny sprays and juvenile plays

are just as greedy as a bulldozer's mouth

chewing life into debris for me to dish-wash and make poetry of.

War machines wear lipstick, carry bedazzled purses, and wave

hellohowareyou?

vogue on said debris / pink faucets. If you ignore the rubble,

this is a haven––its earth is flesh, brown and uncounted.

War machines are American-made, and they are never thirsty / rivers in their throats.

American water is brown and dirtied and children famished,

cracked, caged in cages, / in uneducated education.

Surf their boats in drought. Their knuckles stiff, cold is this verse.

I sit here wondering:

Which me will survive bulldozers undoing God?

Which me will soak their hands in these wells?

Which me will console the dead's loved ones with prevention, not

mourning,

bottle our Jordan River to smack American thirst,

for greed and grief.

Water stolen or neglected.

Which me will survive all these liberations?