NVN Extra: BETWEEN HERE AND THERE

by Cindy Ellen Hill

A baby receives treatment for malnutrition at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat on May 31, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of Nader Garghon/Al-Awda Hospital via The Intercept, June 19, 2025

*

I wish I could explain, but I can’t. The starvation is beyond anything normal. It feels like our bodies have started eating themselves.

--Sara, age 20, engineering college student, Gaza, text, June 21, 2025

*

The distance from my eyes to my Samsung
telephone screen is just about the same
as the distance from my plate to my tongue.
 
Text messages appear below a name
that could be the name of a close neighbor
across a picket fence as tall as shame.
 
I tap the cell phone screen, thin as paper.
I hear my old refrigerator hum.
My garden is a few steps from my door,
 
its pea pods swelling as thick as my thumb,
green peas inside, still tender, sweet and young,
packed in as close as can be. Everyone
 
is born out of the closeness of the womb,
then drifts through hate into a separate tomb.

*

Author's note: Behind the headlines about the Israel-Iran conflict and the US joining in the fray are daily reports of Gazans being shot while attempting to get food and water at aid stations. I am a poetry mentor for We Are Not Numbers an organization and online literary magazine publishing the work of Gazan writers. I stay in touch with my assigned poets after their work is published. Last night, I received the text which forms the epigraph of this poem.

*

Cindy Ellen Hill is author of Wild Earth and Other Sonnets (Antrim Press 2021), Elegy for the Trees (Kelsay Books 2022), Mosaic: Poems from Travels in Italy (Wild Dog Press 2024), and Love in a Time of Climate Change(Finishing Line Press 2025). Her novel in sonnet verse, Leeds Point, will be released in 2026 from Selkie Songs Press. Her poetry has been included in Open Door Review, Flint Hills Review, Anacapa Review, and The Lyric. Her essays on sonnet elements have recently appeared in American Poetry Review and Unlikely Stories. She holds an MFA in fiction and poetry, and lives in Vermont.