Apples Don’t Know

Apples Don’t Know

Apples don’t know
which side they fall on.
They grow red just the same,
tasting of sun and old rain.

A grandmother picks mint
by the stone wall,
humming a tune
that crossed long before wires did.

Children draw maps in the dust
with sticks,
but the wind always blows them away.
Borders, they learn,
are not written in earth
only in rules
they did not write.

Somewhere beyond,
a cousin lights a lantern,
the same light
we watch from here
through the branches.
We do not wave
but we notice.

Jasmine climbs the fence
without fear.
No one told it
there was a line
it shouldn't cross.

The rooster crows on both sides.
Rain falls without asking.
Even prayers
those whispered after dusk
rise together,
woven with the same longing.

And in the evening,
when the mountain turns blue,
we drink tea
sweet with memory,
and speak of cherry trees,
of summers that tasted
like home,
even when we didn’t say the word.

The elders still tell stories
of roads that once curled
like threads between hills,
when footsteps were passports,
and the only gate was the sky.

My aunt still stitches
with thread from the old place,
her hands remembering
what maps have forgotten.

There’s a song
that belongs to both sides
one part sung here,
the other lost
somewhere between
static and silence
on the radio.

And still
the mountain stays whole,
the apples ripen,
the jasmine returns each spring.
What divides cannot undo
what lives in the roots.

 

Body Is Here, Heart Is There - A Tribute to the Druze of Al-Suwayda

I brew tea in the quiet morning
but my hands shake.
The cup doesn’t warm me
not when the air is heavy
with names I haven’t heard in days.
Names I may never hear again.

My body moves
buys bread, nods politely,
pretends to live
but my heart is back there,
pressed to the dirt roads of Suwayda,
listening for footsteps
that may never return.

I wake to numbers,
to grainy photos,
to silence.
And every silence is a scream.

How do you carry this grief
across borders?
How do you mourn
when your mourning
can’t reach the graves?

I see the smoke in my sleep.
I see a child’s shoe,
a doorway torn open,
a father who couldn’t protect.
And I see the world
look away.

I am here,
safe
and it feels like betrayal.

I light candles that flicker with guilt.
I write poems no one reads.
I scroll and scroll,
looking for proof they are still alive.

What do you do
when you can do nothing?
When love isn’t a shield,
and prayers don’t stop bullets?

I carry them in every heartbeat,
in every breath I don’t deserve to take in peace.
I whisper to the sky:
Let them live. Let them live.

But the wind only brings more names.

My body is here,
but my heart
is buried
beneath Suwayda’s soil
still waiting
for the sun to rise again.

 

Erase the Killer, Remember the Women - On Bright Young Women and What Happens When We Center Survivors Instead of Killers

There are books that entertain, books that inform, and then there are books that unsettle something inside you.

Bright Young Women is the third kind. From the first page, I could tell this wasn’t going to be a comfortable read. But it was going to be an honest one.

Even the title held weight. The phrase “bright young man” is one we’ve heard a thousand times. Used to excuse, to soften, to humanize men even in the face of brutality. It’s the phrase they used for him. The killer. He was the one described as bright, promising, misunderstood. Meanwhile, the women he murdered were reduced to numbers, statistics, or headlines that faded with time.

Jessica Knoll doesn’t give us another voyeuristic true crime narrative. Instead, she pulls the camera away from the man behind the horror and points it finally at the women. The ones who lived. The ones who died. The ones who were never supposed to be remembered for anything more than their proximity to him.

And she lets them speak.

This novel is inspired by the real-life crimes of Ted Bundy, but Knoll refuses to name him. Not once. Not a single time. That silence is intentional and loud. In its place, she gives voice to survivors. To friendship. To fear. To the slow, painful path toward something like justice.

The story follows Pamela Schumacher and Ruth Wachowsky, two women whose lives are shattered by a single night of unthinkable violence. But this isn’t a story about that night. It’s about everything after. It’s about the misogyny that corrodes justice. About the way the media turns monsters into myths and victims into footnotes. About how homophobia, class, and politics twist around the truth until it’s almost unrecognizable.

But even more than that, it’s about the power of women who refuse to stay quiet.

Reading this book, I felt the weight of witnessing a world that refuses to believe women or worse, forgets them entirely. And I felt, too, the quiet rage of survival. The quiet beauty of resilience. The kind of love that exists between women who have nothing left but each other and choose, again and again, to rise.

It isn’t an easy read. It isn’t meant to be.
But it is a necessary one.