Saturday in Bethlehem, and: To Leave Out

Abstract

Saturday in Bethlehem, and: To Leave Out Jazelle Jajeh (bio) Saturday in Bethlehem Two girls hold cactus fruits, sit against theSeparation wall, cross-legged the way I wasin kindergarten on my blue and red carpetsquare. Behind them, graffiti, paintings ofMarwan Barghouti, his chin in his hands,the woman plane hijacker, her lips parted over their braids. The fruit is fiveshekels a bag. My mother watches the greenin their hands shift from light to dark as theydrop them. I sit against a concretefountain that could have had wateronce, my cousins beside me with a bag of falafel, ka'ak, freckled baked eggs, all thefood I turned away. Must have beensomething in the water. My motherwill never get sick here. She knows where to look,what to wash out or leave whole. She watches the girls peel fruit with their fingernails. Theyellow flesh emerging. Only in the Americas is theflesh pink; here it's just like everything else, bakedin time, light stripped clean. All the faded blue doors,crowded stalls, boys in ripped jeans, iPhones bulgingtheir hips, wire people strung together in the faded amber light. What does it say? All my time here, whensomeone peels open a cactus fruit, I expect it to be pink. [End Page 187] To Leave Out My grandfather loved spam because he did nothave options and when united nationstrucks came all in white his family wasthe only Christian one left meaning porkmeaning only they could take what was leftover. My grandfather and his brothers slepton a roof eating un spam they leftWest Jerusalem which was at once JustJerusalem which was now left for theforeigners and soldiers who would not eat thespam. At my great uncle's house in Detroithe pushes pink slices of what they hadtoward us. Yallah eat he says.My brother grimaces at the flesh texture.It's good. It will last forever. [End Page 188] Jazelle Jajeh Jazelle Jajeh was born in the San Francisco Bay area and continues to live there. She is a product of the Palestinian diaspora in California and finds this to be a happy accident. She recently received her bachelor's degree in English from the University of San Francisco. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press