Until All of Us Are Free
for Rasha Abousalem
You might not believe it now, but Gaza was once lush with citrus orchards. For hundreds of years, Palestinian farmers tended to expansive orange and lemon groves… Over the decades… Israeli soldiers and settlers bulldozed, torched and poisoned thousands of acres of citrus groves across Gaza. During the 1980s and ’90s, Israel claimed it was necessary to uproot and destroy citrus groves so they could not be used to shelter Palestinian resistance fighters.
—Washington Post, June 17, 2024
Rasha is traveling again. And I’m dreaming—
or trying to dream—of the taste
of the best orange I’ve ever had.
To remember with purpose
is to imagine, and to imagine is a kind
of power. Since October,
any sensation of pleasure
is accompanied by darkness,
a pitch so wide, so empty,
black space fleshed out
with the blushing pinpricks
of stars. Shame, do you remember me?
One segment of an orange
holds the sensation of soil,
heat of it on the fingers,
scent of mint and earth. Seed
of orange, do you remember me?
One slice feels
like a mouth
in my mouth, this body
evolved with it, evolved to taste
the ovary of a single
blossom. Inside, a flood
of afternoon light. Ancestral river.
Rasha and I are the same age, both live
in Columbia, Missouri, both have
ovaries, no children, fathers
who have crossed over.
Have they met, there,
on the other side?
Rasha is in Egypt again, I’m in the presence
of images of death,
Rasha is at the border that flows
with blood. I think of her, my friend
who watches the blood of her people
flowing into the land. When I don’t
think I can open further, I try
to open. Try to see the flow
of a just time in front of us,
before us. Try to see Rasha and me,
insisting oranges from their rinds.
Try to taste it. The dream of not until.
Dream of Haifa, that coastal city
her father was forced from as a boy,
that city where my grandmother’s cousin—
fleeing death
in Kolomyia—
settled and had children
who were taught to believe the soil,
the sea, the fruit, the right
to kill, was now theirs alone.
Rasha is traveling again, and I’m dreaming
of swimming
with her, one day, in that sea. Not yet,
but one day. Not until.
Not if, but when
Palestine is free.
Cass Donish, a queer poet and writer, is the author of the poetry collections Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award; The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019), was selected for publication by Maggie Nelson. Donish has taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Missouri, Kenyon College's Young Writers Workshop, Ashland University's low-residency MFA program, Tin House, and Hugo House. They live and write on the unceded ancestral lands of the Osage Nation, Otoe-Missouria, Očeti Šakowin (Sioux), Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, Illini-Peoria, and other Indigenous peoples who were unjustly and forcibly displaced, in a place also known as Columbia, Missouri.