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Shahrazad, circa 2024

By Aiya Sakr

On the day of the first flour massacre,
nothing I have ever said has been untrue.

Fourteen thousand and three hundred white
PVC flags flutter in the early spring morning.

By the time I cross the lawn, the IDF have killed
another child, and another flag springs up

Like a poppy.
This simile is too easy.

I can buy a bundle of one hundred tear-resistant
marking flags for $11.

Flour is also tear-resistant.
In Gaza, a kilo of flour costs approximately a life.

Jumping spiders do not spin webs. Instead, they evolved
sharp vision that allows them to perceive depth.

This helps them accurately stalk prey. This also means
they can see details on the moon.

They leave draglines of silk behind them
to anchor them to the place they’ve left.

They’ve traded weaving for the moon.
How to estimate currency. What is the conversion rate.

Kevlar® is five times tougher than steel. In addition to its
natural yellow color, it comes in red, blue, orange, green, and black.

When testing Kevlar® for military use, researchers
anesthetized goats and wrapped them in several layers.

Then, they shot at their hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs, and spines
and waited for them to die.

More tear-resistant than PVC and even Kevlar®,
but perhaps not as tear-resistant as flour—spider silk.

Spiders resist domestication. This is why
their silk is so hard to commercially extract.

When only one goat died after 24 hours, they were granted $5 million
to develop the fabric for bullet-proof vests.

Bread is not fabric. In some lights, spiderwebs look
as though they’ve been dipped in liquid gold.

Flour woven into bread loses
its tear-resistant quality.

Flour is white. Flour is also red.
Put a group of baby spiders in a room

and they begin to kill each other.
I don’t want to wrap children

in Kevlar®. I don’t want to write
this poem about children. I can also see

details on the moon. What did I trade?
Currency. This poem is too easy.

 

 

 

Listen as Aiya Sakr reads Shahrazad, circa 2024.
Added: Friday, July 26, 2024  /  Used with permission. This poem published through the Poem of the Week Series is part of the Poetry Coalition's 2024 slate of programs in the spring and summer that reflect the transformative impact poetry has on individual readers and communities across the nation, and is made possible in part by the Academy of American Poets with support from the Mellon Foundation.
Aiya Sakr
Photo by Kanika Ahuja.

Aiya Sakr (she/they) is a Palestinian-American poet and artist. They are the author of Her Bones Catch the Sun (The Poet’s Haven, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Foglifter, Mizna, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and her art has been featured in ATL Radical Art's Threads of Resistance. She is a co-organizer for In Water and Light, a regular community building space and reading series for Palestine. She is also a Winter 2023 Tin House Fellow, and has served as Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University. She collects buttons, and is enthusiastic about birds.

Image Description: Aiya Sakr, a person with brown skin and a brown curly bob, smiles widely at the camera. They wear red glasses, silver pomegranate dangle earrings, and a white eyelet sundress. She is surrounded by clusters of bushy purple flowers, some of which cover her chin and chest.

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