The opening of a recently published essay called “Notes to Gaza’s Beloved Dead” by Palestinian-American poet George Abraham. Click here to read the entire essay at Atmos.

A promise to our dead and (briefly, necessarily, though not consensually) resurrected: I am searching for a form through which my words might be capable of, one day, holding you. I will not make you object or spectacle. This world is already super-saturated with your viscera, and so, the only way I know to write to you is not with words but with the spilled guts of what my language has become. I cannot focus on anything but you these days. The world is spiraling onwards, intent on burying you, unmourned. The ruling class are reaching for an unmournable world through your bodies. But even in my inability to turn away, my looking itself becomes a violence. As you become content, become news and feed, my looking becomes a unit of capital from which corporations profit. I am hoping, instead, to wander with, and not from, you. To you, and to the living who commit themselves to you, I am responsible. To you, I owe what little life I have left to give.