Waiting
in Gaza
there are sisters
who sit
some alone
some together
though they take small comfort
in company
we sit and we wait
one says
on a phone
to a friend
in the West
before lines are lost
wait for our bomb to come
or for the bombs to stop
not knowing for which
they wait
they wait the same way
and wonder if it's
better not to know
for still five times a day
they pray bodies bowed
nose to the ground
as if to practice its final posture
and five times a day
their bodies rise again
as if saved
Alhamduliilah! they call out to each other as if spared to do more
than wait and pray
my bomb she says
the only intimacy left
as she
listens for the one that will claim her
the last thing to ever touch her
the last thing she will ever know
Geneffa Jahan published her first collection, "Spilling the Chai: Poems about Family and Food," in 2024, and finally paid off her burial plot in Half Moon Bay. She writes about this coincidence in her essay, "Laid to Rest," which will appear next year in an anthology edited by OG Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston.