☀ Today's Poem: "Autocorrect" Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Texting you about floodplains
in the ancient world and alluvial
transforms into I loved. Your name

cannot stand on its own, predictive
text attaches -esque, refashions you
into a quality of yourself, digital

synecdoche. One of my children's names only
appears in ALL CAPS no matter my attempts to save her
in my dictionary; the quietest squalling across the screen.

How do we decide where the ancient begins?

The end of the century in which we came of age
is a rift valley, our memories dropping steeply
at the margins. To describe it to my children I say: there was

no way to reach us if we wandered. No monuments
of our days until the film was developed.
What we knew of time was organized on notecards

in narrow wooden drawers, and we had to take
the bus and walk up several flights of stairs to search it. I text

about what I long for and cannot reach
this year, no nation, just sunlight
on striated hillsides in early spring, and terra rossa becomes terror.

Do you think the agents assigned to us wear
trench coats and dark sunglasses? Do they write

their reports about us in invisible ink? In ancient times,
the floodplain of the Jordan was covered
in reeds, tamarisk, and willows.

I regret mentioning the tamarisk, how
it ushers in multiple congregations,

concertina wire. How my longings
are only publishable as anti-pastorals,
refined alterations of a text that contend,

collapse. My poem was in that first revelation,
the text confiding that what endures
of the alluvial plain, the earth of ancestry, is love.