Commons image of Ahmed Samir Odeh
By Nick Moss
ONE
Administrative detention sounds like nothing much,
Sounds like a formality, like a temporary
Bureaucratic hold; like a traffic stop.
Unless you’re Palestinian.
Administrative detention is internment
Said politely. The “administrative” is just
Legalese for “endlessly renewable”,
While you’re beaten and starved
And kicked and beaten and kicked some more,
Then disgorged, spat out; like Ahmed Samir Odeh,
23, from Huwara, arrested
February 2026, tortured, starved, denied medical treatment,
Then released; dead by July.
Spent most of his twenties in administrative detention.
And even when not imprisoned, never really free.
Still scarred, still slowly dying.
TWO
In Trumpland, in the Twin Cities,
Rage, organised and mobilised,
Broke the back of Operation Metro Surge,
But only after the subzero ice
Was flecked with crystalled blood
From the bodies of Renée Good
And Alex Pretti, both executed by ICE
for refusing to concede the streets.
Tear gas falls more quickly to the ground
Below zero, but bullets don’t.
The Department of Homeland Security’s paramilitary KKK
Has moved on through Texas and Maine
Leaving Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
And Joan Sebastian Guerrero
As “bumps in the road”, to use
Tom Homan’s phrase; slaughtered;
Butchered; iced, to spell it out.
THREE
Never time to take in the present atrocity
Before we lurch towards the next.
“There will be nothing like it!!!
Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!”
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
This is the routinisation of repression,
The purported exception congealing as norm.
When they slaughter thousands and call it peace,
There is no middle ground now between resistance and defeat.
