I was moved to tears by a footnote in Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine that described the theft of 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries by Zionist forces around 1948, which is around the same time as my maternal grandparents and over 700,000 other Palestinians fled. I wanted to write a poem about it, because it is such a huge and intentional violent erasure of culture and existence— one that I knew nothing about— but I couldn’t process such an enormous loss. I was flooded emotionally, and my brain couldn’t make sense of such a large number. So I started writing the numbers by hand in an attempt to slow down the process and digest what that kind of destruction meant. It was an exercise, a process, that I never thought would be the end result.