A quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog.

Handwriting practice.
All the letters you need 
in one easy to remember phrase.

A quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog.

Picture the sentence hurtling
through a field. (Maybe
it’s escaping rocket fire.
Do they have foxes in Gaza?)

It comes across the sleeping dog
and lets it lie there wrapped
in its tight little cliche.  Flies over it
the way your pen never did.

Your pen
had to be precise. No slop,
no blots, no hesitation.

You had to be so careful
when you wrote
back then — every letter needed to be 
a shelter.

If you wrote badly
on the blackboard you’d be
mocked at the very least.
They’d blow you up,
they would. 

A quick brown fox 
jumps over the lazy dog

on its way south. You are
traveling as fast as you can
among the familiar ravening
of the wakened dogs of war. 
Are there foxes in Gaza? Well,
there are now. There are
again. No need
for cursive script to write 
curses. You needn’t
stop to write. In fact,
you can’t. 

A quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog.

I’m up too late.
What good does writing do
in such a lovely hand as mine?
What good am I to the struggle
when it’s so far away?

And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and coupled them tail to tail, and fastened torches between the tails.

A Quick Brown fox, or rather
a pair of them, screaming,
jumps over the lazy dog. The lazy dog
burns and itself is screaming
like a rocket, like a fighter jet.

Everything is screaming and no one
can write their way out of this,
standing in memory
at old-school blackboards
trying to write a new phrase
but we can’t keep our hands from shaking.

No one is anything other
than a dog waking in terror
or a fox someone else set on fire.