Lena K Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet and translator of Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian heritage. She was raised on Fairuz songs and fresh pistachios from her grandparents’ trees. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Greek, Heberw, Italian and Spanish and have been read at anti-war events in Gaza, London, Tokyo and Toronto and across the United States. They have been published in International and American journals including Sukoon, James Franco Review, Borderlands Texas Review, The Lake for Poetry, Lunch Ticket, Mizna and Ofi Press Mexico. If in case your partner is behaving in a diverse way, attempt to identify the problem as soon as possible. tab viagra 100mg Do your research first and ask your doctor to prevent the adverse drug brand viagra mastercard effects and to ensure the safe treatment. Both active ingredients in sildenafil generic from canada the medication have been approved by the FDA (Food& Drug Administration). For more information, cipla india viagra http://www.slovak-republic.org/work/ please visit 99eyao website: What makes a Good alcohol detox Ky Therapist? Any psychotherapist can be counted as a form of medication and herbal alternatives were soon sought. Two of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2014 and 2015). Her first book of poems, Water & Salt, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2017. She lives in Redmond, Washington with her family. You can read more of her work at www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com

before you can see

we’ll need to adjust the lens

we find that natural light can be

unforgiving,

all those lines and jagged edges

glaring,

beads of sweat shimmering on the brow

scarlet of a fresh wound

unfurling across a body

might overwhelm

we’ll need to calibrate

before you react

before you assign any labels to what you see

(like injustice)

before you identify any emotions stirring in you

(like anger or shame)

we’ll need to fine-tune

It’s so complicated, this cycle

what appears so obvious

cannot be named

to maximize clarity

find a signature for the moment

we’ll need to select an image

layer the right sounds on top of it

we assemble a collage of now

so you can understand what’s at stake

so you can understand what you think you are seeing

the information that is

being sent from your eyeballs to your brain

is just raw data

and must be processed for you

This is called Context.

see for example the brown-skinned boy

slender limbs running across the street

a rock in his hand

focus on the rock

if you feel a bit unsettled by the chaos unfolding on his street

the smoke billowing from fires all around him

the tank pouring out armed soldiers

at the vanishing point where he aims

steady yourself with the thought

of the damage that the rock could conceivably do

and here it would be illuminating to note

that we have soldiers too

our boys sent across the globe

and don’t we love our boys?

and don’t we want them to come home safe?

see? A tank isn’t necessarily a bad thing a semi-automatic

weapon aimed at a child maybe isn’t

what it appears to be

now hold these feelings in front of your eyes

as you look at that brown boy with the rock in his hand

This is called Nuance.

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now it gets trickier

you’ll need to remain vigilant

now that rock-throwing boy

wounds still fresh on his face

eyes half open to the sky

re-appears in the foreground swaddled in a flag piled onto a stretcher

and beneath him a teeming sea of people

swells in what was the street they are lifting what’s left of him overhead

let us now turn up the volume for you

let’s pan out resist the urge to look too long at

any one face

here a wide camera angle will do best

what are all these people saying?

focus on the totality of the sounds

why aren’t they softer? shouldn’t sorrow

be soft modest relatable?

focus on the Allahu akbar

who else says that? what have you learned to feel about those words?

This is called Critical Thinking.

IV.

if you find yourself distracted

caught by the anguish on the mother’s

face in the crowd

focus instead on her veil

notice how many women in the crowd are veiled

how do you feel about that?

let the question fall slowly

between you and the mother

whose son’s limbs have been

collected for burial

if you find your stomach

tightening at the sight of her pain

if you find yourself measuring

the miniscule space her son’s

corpse takes up on the stretcher

if your eyes find others in the crowd

focus

focus again on the sound that floats up

the words you don’t speak

you do not know these people

why are they so angry?

tune into how their grief is loud

and disarrayed and confusing

and threatens to make you feel bad

stay with these feelings

now hold these feelings in front of your eyes

to filter the images you are seeing.

This is called Balance.

For more poems by Lena K Tuffaha read the full winter 2015 issue

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Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

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