Anyone here know what Shatila stands for?
You might find that as--
in Michigan there's a sweet factory
called Shatila Sweet Factory.
Shatila is a refugee camp-- a Palestinian refugee
camp-- in Lebanon.
It's just outside old Beirut, and there was a huge--
there was a famous massacre that happened there, in 1983.
We leave the details out.
So speaking of this body, and the man-woman thing,
I'll read this text--
So I just wanted to say something.
So in the longer poems in Textu, each section is 160 characters.
So I was maintaining a sense of prosody,
but you can also call OCD.
[LAUGHTER]
"Dear sister, a September is had in Shatila."
So the massacre happened in September,
since it seems to be an international holy month.
"Dear sister, a September is had in Shatila.
A 14-year-old girl wrote, my love, I'm like a rose--
some days, I decorate weddings, other days, graves.
She is not alone.
Dear sister, life is a conspiracy.
As zygote, you were subaltern.
You couldn't speak, or you spoke when no one was listening,
were spoken for when silent--
a wedding.
Dear sister, in Phoenix, an American woman
has been saving Afghan women.
And her French husband who helped in the kitchen
said, the Congolese fathom only violence.