Yasmeen Amro
They Beat the Women Too
They beat the women too.
Gas canisters pop and I never knew
my body could run before I give it the command to.
And the police come forward like a river
with their batons, striking and striking.
They are made of fucking iron.
This whole country is an iron dome, metallic shell
of a bullet, inbound to our eyes, our mouths.
They fill with blood that isn’t ours, with words we do not remember placing.
I want to shout, to scream their screams.
But the voice is never right, because it is not mine.
The only light is a rocket
Orange swell over the block of black.
I have to see it. Through the eyes of a mounted camera.
The only thing that will remain in the rubble of this city.
They beat the women too.
I address them with my best Arabic, shaking.
“I’m leaving. I’m leaving.”
And I put my hands up when I should be pummeling them
The light never stops. It’s one rocket after the other.
It’s a sponge of darkness to soak up the blood.
It’s the cutting of the comms.
The chilling silence that is only sliced by inhuman instruments.
They beat the women too.
Their drones fly closer now.
They’re red and they stand so still in the black sky.
I’m watching them in his yard.
He brings me water and I take it with trembling hands and shaky Arabic.
“Thank you so much” is the only phrase I can remember.
Orange is all I can see. I watch through the pinpricks of pixels on my TV screen.
It must be so bright on the streets where they’re not screaming.
They’re huddling for warmth and for love and for their motherland.
They’re huddling for a place where they can shout its name freely.
They’re huddling for a place where the military police don’t prowl at checkpoints.
They’re huddling for a place where they don’t beat the women too.
“This poem was written hastily in my phone’s notes app as I was fleeing police during a pro-Palestinian protest in Jordan. I was channeling my pure emotion, and the panic and anger I was feeling in the moment. The police were striking everyone before me, and I saw that they did not spare even the women. When I finally escaped, there were people standing outside of the protest bounds, warning all others coming in to protest, that the police beat the women too.
When I finally made it to my grandmother’s house, she had the TV set to the local news where they were livestreaming incoming missiles over the darkened city of Gaza. I added to my poem, and wrote about the terror we all felt watching helplessly as Gaza was left in the dark and pummeled with missiles.” —Yasmeen Amro
Yasmeen Amro is a Palestinian-Jordanian-Texan author. She currently lives in Jordan. In her spare time, she writes science fiction, paints, and reads.