Sakina Hassan
They weren’t killed
They simply died
A terrible tragedy
Not arrested only detained
Womanhandled, gently, gently
Escorted off the premises
And into unmarked vehicles
Re-educated, realigned, reassembled
And while in processing
Hearts stopped
Nerves unraveled
Inexplicably
Bodies disintegrated untouched
Blood rose, and escaped through wounds that
We cannot confirm at this time
While there is some
Concern for their whereabouts
Hereabouts the missing are
Only runaways
That choking sound
Is only the air refusing
To be breathed in
Sakina Hassan abandoned academia for a job as a librarian in the development sector. She has put full-time work on hold for new motherhood and writes in her spare time. Her poetry has been published in The Aleph Review and Gully Collective. Her short story, ‘Bodies in the Air’, has been longlisted for the ZHR Writing Prize 2023. She is also the 2023 winner of the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction for her story ‘The Shoe Shop Jinn’.
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