A poem written on a shoe with a pen I snuck in my underwear into a skeletal cell in the IDF’s pre-jail holding center

For the last 26 hours I have been held in a Hollywood-worthy-in-its-draconionity cell in pre-jail arrest facility. I’m talkin’: metal bed frames in a white room decorated with dust, paint splotches and forlorn scribbles on the wall of previous prisoners affirming to someone (themselves?) that they were here. No books, no mats or even scratchy blankets except between midnight and 6 AM when we are screamed awake to a breakfast of dry sandwiches. We are now being transferred to Jail 6, where I was sentenced to 10 days again, so I have my phone for a bit. After being there for a day, going back to 6 feels like going home. Well. Almost. I don’t have much time with my phone, but I wanted to upload a poem I wrote on a shoe while in my cell:

The aloneness here
is loud
My cellmate is screaming and kicking the thick metal door
which is also loud.
But this morning the light has crashed
onto the bars and spilled a pattern
onto the dead-egg wall that looks like
a Japanese lantern.
Everything here an echo.
The shouts echo, the footsteps, Germany and Gaza and bombed buses
and buildings and the barbed wire
that haloes the separation wall.
I wonder what echoes the others hear.
A faucet is leaking and I imagine
rain and mist and dark pines and wild
horses and hours pass as they do,
as they must.