An old man in our camp in Hebron once told me, “Our land only speaks through those who bleed in silence.” He was selling watermelon from a donkey cart, stabbing the fruit and handing out pieces to taste. His wrists were dark and thin, the skin pulled tight around old burns or scars—I couldn’t tell. I asked him for a sweet one. He picked one up without tapping, not like my father taught me, and when I asked how he knew, he said, “The sweetest ones are the ones that took the most sun.” I asked how he could tell, and he tapped a patch where the rind had cracked near the stem. “Look, son,” he said. “Look. It held on until it couldn’t anymore.”
POETRY July 1, 2026
Where The Rind Cracked
L.F. Khouri is a Palestinian writer whose work explores war, memory, and the inheritance of silence. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations appear or are forthcoming in journals including The Missouri Review, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, River Teeth, The Adroit Journal, EPOCH Magazine, The Rumpus, Alaska Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, Brevity, and elsewhere. He is the winner of The Georgia Review Prose Prize 2026 and was selected for Best Microfiction 2026.
Social Media: @KhouriLF119061
Social Media: @KhouriLF119061