Margaree Little

The Broken Jaw

It's a series of shudders on the hill by the trees that are pulled to cavities this afternoon
in July, the end of July, and we shudder with onions in our pockets as the advancement

commences and retreats and commences again, that we should line up for fire, that they
should fire the canisters at us from grenades, or the live bullets all brassy and small or those

with rubber sleeves to bounce the death into you, they are young guys from
Detroit or Russia and they take olives in their mouths and in Hebrew spit

a warning, then the man beside me is shot in the leg; he stammers to lurch in the dinning
raze, that bright and permanganate place, where a femur split in a moment which is all

it takes, and our breathing is short from the gas of the day white and white to the white
roofs of the town to the mosque head which is some exquisite sky. God is big! We are

sitting in the dust and waiting, we are more thirsty than we thought thirst could be, we are
linking arms before the tanks where they will come to get the kids in t-shirts who throw

the stones or the woman who hurls Jihad unfurled from her window to the
curled landscape of a Semitic vocabulary and to her town now employed

with luck and gangrene. In a minute it happens. I turn my face and it is someone
I've not met before nor will again but his jaw is at once to the left of him, his

gums hesitate the eyebrows are raised and there are teeth on the ground teeth on the
ground, he is gaping and gazing, this stranger, this clear-eyed and thick human thing.

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Margaree Little is a junior at Brown University. She has traveled, studied, and worked in Central and South America and the West Bank of Palestine. This is her first publication. photograph by Rose Kaufman contents | previous | next