Escape Plan
by Maria Elle
Zine #30 — June 2024
Escape Plan is a collection of poetry that explores what it means to hold the dreams of the future while grappling with the persistent horrors of now, through the lens of love, war, Capitalist-driven climate devastation, and anti-Zionist Struggles.
avocado groves
The new world will not be won by soldiers.
It will not be led by anyone who has written a book on the subject,
and will not have a 5, 10 or 20 year plan.
It will not be led at all.
It will be built by small hands that do not know what they are building.
Hands that build a house because they need somewhere to sleep.
Hands with bitten nails and alligator skin,
that do not ask for bread,
but take it,
and flip you their middle finger.
Hands that plant avocado trees knowing they will take 50 years to fruit,
who can taste the cream
and feel the pits
sliding smooth in their grandchildren’s mouths.
All futures are written in blood,
but the new world’s will be written by the cracked and calloused feet of
survivors,
not the lifeblood of martyrs.
Blood rich in iron, calcium, magnesium and nitrogen,
that we feed to the budding avocado groves we’ve planted.
The new world will be written counterclockwise around the campfire,
always to be continued tomorrow evening.
It will not “rise like a phoenix from the fires of Revolution,”
but flee choking from the wildfires of California
and the smogs of Hong Kong,
rise gasping from the flood waters of Carolina, New Orleans, the Philippines.
We will not build it because we decide to,
but because we have no other option.
The new world will be a conspiracy
Between us and the fungi,
the fish and the dandelions,
the deer and the elm trees.
Its first language will not be human.
The new world will be carried to each new generation in lullabies and fairy tales,
science fiction and fantasy.
It has already begun.
We awake each morning with our children’s longing in our ears,
and sleep each night sheltered by the sukkah of their wild dreams.
mulberries
Little purple fingers
Mulberry tree
The patio floor covered in half-rotting figs
that smell sweet
Pitting olives on a plastic stool
while your mother lounges
on a cot on the floor.
The first spring rain
exhales
and you come in with your socks soaked
demanding something to eat
The wound on your oldest brother’s leg is healing
and I worry that the humidity
will mildew the bandages.
It’s been three weeks.
Ahmed still hasn’t returned.
No one thought they would keep him this long.
He is only 9 years old.
The rumble of an engine in the driveway,
a twig cracking
footsteps.
Your father with bread and juice.
Rain pools in the trenches of the vineyard
I try to scrub your little purple fingers clean
But, like you, they have a mind of their own
Who am I tell the mulberries
where to leave their stain
roll Jordan
The back of the pickup
smells like dust
and hot summer wind
It is nearly midnight and I am still sweating.
A thousand acres of date palms
Monocropped
drain the banks
of the once-mighty Jordan.
You can see it in the distance,
a trickle behind barbed wire
The green lawns of settlements
whiz past,
and we stop to pick peppers and cabbages
by the side of the road.
They have made the desert bloom.
Only it had bloomed for thousands of years
before they came,
with grasses and wildflowers
hot summer nights
tents and sheep
and tea bubbling on fires.
We turn off the main road into the open desert
Your blue eyes burn me as we pull up
to the tent in which you were born.
In the morning it will be gone,
but you will not be.
You are as stubborn as the mulberry stains
on the little fingers of your little hands.
Poetry after Gaza
“to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”
- Theodor Adorno, 1955
How do you write a poem about barbarism?
Adorno glowers down at me from the shelf to my left,
and ghosts snicker from my sinews.
This is not the most important story to be told right now.
It is not in the top 12,000
the top 1.02 million,
the top 14.3 million.
But it’s my story, and in some ways it’s the only true story I can tell.
This has happened before.
In 1967
and in 1948
and in 1933
and in 1915
and in 1904
and in 1526
and in 1492
and so many other times besides.
He had loved her once.
Loved the way the brim of her hat shaded her face
and her fingers plunged into the sticky summer sand
He was stoic, reserved,
an empty chamber inside him
where a low hissing could be heard when it was quiet.
He loved the feel of her body against his
but lying in bed with her the quiet would surround him
and the hissing would mount until it was nearly a whistle
and he would shove her off the bed
cold sweat staining his forehead
and the sounds of her shouts would drown out the hissing.
He learned to love the sound of her shouting
and of shouting in general
and as the years slouched on her screams came to fill the chamber inside him.
He was grateful.
His brother didn’t want to go.
He loved the gross stale corners of their old fashioned life
the smell of the chicken coop, creaking floorboards
accordion echoes in the dusty corners
salt coming in from the Black Sea on a southern breeze
He had dreams of studying music at a conservatory in Vienna
There was a girl
When the boat came he didn’t get on it.
Most of them didn’t.
Their father was an anarchist.
He hated Russians, but he hated the Tsar more,
and when the revolution came he took up arms alongside a blonde man who
had once killed his cow and smashed his windows in a drunken hate-filled twilight
Neither of them survived the war.
They were not a particularly religious family
but they would light candles Friday night
mostly for her sake
while their father grumbled and condescended about how religion is the
opiate of the masses.
The word Jerusalem never crossed their lips.
In 1932 the Zionists were mostly not taken seriously, at least not east of Vienna.
The idea of transplanting an entire population to a place that for most Jews was little more than mythology was as absurd as suggesting that we all move to Neverland. It wasn’t just that they loved their home. It was that Zionism was a bourgeois fantasy, irrelevant to daily life in the shtetl. As things got worse and they scrambled to get out, it was toward New York that they slouched, not Bethlehem.
In 1943, the same year they were deported to Treblinka, there was an uprising in the camp. Of the 700 who revolted, 70 are known to have survived. There is no way to know if his brother was among them.
I like to imagine he was.
Many wealthy Zionists struck deals with both the Nazis and the allied forces, hedging their bets and securing some Jews escape to Palestine in return for collaboration. When the allies liberated the camps, no European country wanted to accept the refugees. Zionists lobbied the Truman administration to deny Jewish refugees entry to the United States, making Palestine the only available destination. Many Zionists secured positions of power in the refugee camps, coercing survivors and denying food rations to those who refused to emigrate to Palestine.
In just 3 short years, between 1945 and 1948, the same people who survived the Nazi genocide would go on to commit a genocide of our own.
The screams of Deir Yassin echo through the chambers of Treblinka
and through the chamber inside him, drowning out the low hiss.
A beaten child will grow up to beat their child.
There is no great mystery in it.
She used to say Zionism was the worst thing to happen to Jews since the Holocaust.
She wasn’t wrong.
We became what destroyed us,
and in doing so ensured not safety
but barbarism.
Adorno smirks over my shoulder.
This is not the most important story to tell right now.
read Darwish
recite Said,
praise Kanafani
shout Fadwa Tuquan and Liana Badr from the mountain tops.
but on Friday night, by the glow of the candles, tell this story too.
She had loved him once.
Loved the warmth of his hands and the deep marks his heels left,
filling with salt water as the breakers slurped the shore.
Her quiet had once been calm, a secret trove hiding endless mysteries.
Now it trembled with weary nights thrown from the bed,
with screams echoing through floorboards and through decades.
Air sirens wail
Sandstone walls crumble
Ambulances shout noISE NOise nOISE
He can no longer hear the hissing in the chamber.
He is grateful.
Black Friday
“Africa wants its diamonds back”
you yell
as you pound the pole of your flag
against the bullet proof glass
and the hairs on the necks of shopping white ladies
prickle
purple gloves hide your
bleeding chewed nails
while the blood on the window
and behind it
glisten in the wailing blue light
the dryer
I don’t go into saunas.
If the situation arises I say in a flippant tone
“I don’t walk into ovens voluntarily”
which usually makes Jews laugh
and non-Jews uncomfortable,
which I guess is what I’m going for.
But when my brain wilds I do like to climb into the dryer.
I don’t really fit, but with the door open I can pretend,
and imagine I am hidden from whoever I imagine is searching for me.
Sometimes I wonder which of my trauma responses
are individual and which collective.
Like is my desire to hide in the dryer
an echo of hiding under floorboards,
or of hiding from boys with big hands?
and I imagine one is ink
and the other watercolor,
capable of infinite unique combinations
but with clear affinities of color, style and pallet
drawing together bodies of work
and flesh
escape plan
to slip silently out the split of your ends
hunched back in the dead of night
through wild cul-de-sacs and
wailing blue music
into quiet.
the plan vised and revised
every angle tuned tight
you will exit politely
with waterlogged patience
ringed roses and
leftovers left behind
a catalog of the fridge’s contents and
passwords unlocked
to squeeze out through your pores into the
salty hot water
rhapsodic debased carnivorous
greed devour the gasp impossible
flick of your toe on the gearshift
swishing cold orange light
Your cruel streak wishes someone would follow
flashing your high beams to tempt a minnow
but no one takes the bait.
Drums fade
the cold grows warm
the symphony draws its breath
blue music wails louder
and the wild cul-de-sac shivers
arms outstretched to greet you
in the dead of night.
love poem
I was born to find you.
I was born to write you a love poem,
the words already inside me
like a statue hidden in a slab of marble
waiting to be uncovered.
I was born barefoot on an alien planet,
and walked ten generations
to collapse next to you on this deck in the sun.
I was born with razor blades in my eyelids,
and until I met you I never slept.
I still never sleep, but for different reasons.
I was born with a mouth full of your teeth and my ancestors’ prayers,
and when I spit them out you hid them for me under my pillow.
I was born with your crazy in my head,
and I heard your voice long before I met you.
I was born with a thousand voices in my ears,
and they told me that meant I was crazy,
but I think it just means I am a communist or an anarchist or whatever.
I was born in a bathtub full of cortisol,
and so were you,
and I think that’s why we are friends.
They were all killed,
but he survived,
and she survived,
a little worse for wear
and with a bathtub full of cortisol inside her,
and every day I wondered why she bothered.
And here we are on this deck in the Sun,
bulldozers down the block coming to destroy everything we’ve built.
Our toes sift in the dirt and a bee sucks red clover.
And I know why she bothered.
And I know why he bothered.
They watch us from the wall, your ancestors and mine,
and I say my last Kaddish for them.
Because we have found each other,
and so their souls can move on
to the next adventure.
About the Author
Maria Elle is a wingnut anarchist Jewish dyke extremist whore anti-Zionist psycho who writes poetry, conspires against the Empire, and organizes for collective liberation. Follow on insta at @Lchiam.Intifada.
