Kaffiyeh on Mississippi Avenue

History is a black and white scarf tied on the head of a boy who lost his brother on inauguration night, call it a kaffiyeh, because it is & the black knots

at the end a fist, a little weight to keep the head bent towards the ground, where the bodies are left, & it is silence that keeps you from talking about them,

the young people who write their lives into the space a newspaper obituary offers. My closed mouth a flask tilted to the heavens as he spoke, the kaffiyeh’s knots

swing, bullets & death and the way you tie the scarf like so, around the neck, because it hides part of your face, prepares everyone to pretend: there is a justice some

place that is faceless, & as ruthless as a group of eighth graders stomping out the boy who didn’t run fast enough—& the truth here

is that the kaffiyehs I see on the heads of young boys who talk shit, call each other goons & rep neighborhoods they call 3rd world, the scarves have nothing to do

with the little girl who stood in a school house of dust & ash after the bombs stopped falling in Palestine, the kaffiyehs, sold at a flea market near Eastern Market

have made their way into a school filled with the after math of a bombing, without the bombing—the quiet revelations about death, when a country rocks

in celebration and no one hears the gun shots, & the kaffiyeh is nothing but a word in a poem, a word that pulls the blood of the world into one spot

& makes the living boy’s brother something dead, yes, but also something else, another body buried in a story that none of us is aware of.