A wounded girl sneaks through the algorithm.

A bullet burrows under the root of her ponytail,

Copper tic swelling at the base of her skull.

A blue glove bears her arm to give or take fluids.

She faces, stony, away on a rare hospital bed.

Is she sedated, stunned or serene? We lose context behind a screen.

A chill prickles my neck with certainty

That I bought the bullet,

Just like its rifle cradled out of frame—

Nations don’t buy firepower in tidy one-packs.

I don’t want to call her brave

Because I don’t think she wants to be brave.

I think she wants to play soccer,

Or brew concoctions in the kitchen,

Or dance with family.

Or, like me at her age, conduct playful experiments,

Groundbreaking child science where we dropped things from high places

To see how they’d break or rebound,

And tuck deep in my budding brain the stories they told

Of cause and effect.

I could be wrong; we shouldn’t practice

Dreaming on behalf of the distant and silenced.

If not brave, what then can I call her?

The video title calls her ‘Palestinian Child.’

The surgeon calls her Lana

As her parents used to do.