Glass for Breakfast by Nur Turkmani

Glass for Breakfast
Nur Turkmani

God make our rage count for something.
The apple tree. The grapevine wrapping itself
around the trunk, how it can’t let go.
Every day someone tells me to leave—
‘Beirut is next.’
Did I hear correctly. Do you see what we see.
Don’t tell me Lebanon. Don’t tell me Palestine.
In Baalbeck the orchards have yellowed.
The apples plopping like stones.
No money to water our lands, the farmer says.
We hate our guilt. We love the same journalists.
Wish they knew. Wish they didn’t have to.
When we gather we still light candles.
It will not be the last time.
The jar of raspberry jam breaks onto the floor,
and I dream you ate glass for breakfast,
but I can’t listen. My hair shreds like paper.
Rim Banna was alive. She sang of butterflies and night.
I chop more beetroot. No ceasefire.
25,000 killed in Gaza.
I wake up to check the numbers.
How dare the little wind put me to sleep.
My soup hardens into clumps.
I walk past the Mediterranean Sea,
then back home. These are not my feet.
I oil my hair in rosemary.
I open the windows. Who isn’t sick.
Everything looks like blood.
All those eyes watching. My despair. My hunger.
My coffee spills over the counter.

MARGINALIA

1.
I know what it means to carry grief that doesn’t belong only to you, but moves through your body anyway—passed from voice to voice, across oceans. There is nothing abstract about what is happening, and yet my days keep asking me to function, to reply politely, to sleep while the numbers rise.

2.
Haven’t you been feeling it too? Aren’t you too living at the edge of a breaking point, and everything ordinary like a spilled cup or a half-sentence becomes unbearable because of what it echoes?

3.
I look at my hands and wish I could hold together what the world insists on shattering.

4.
I want our rage to count for something.

5.
Rage is all I have left when I run out of language to describe what I see.

6.
There’s no metaphor left that can hold this. I feel the shame of waking up in a room untouched by war. How do I move through the day without breaking?