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Courtney LeBlanc

In Short – Issue 5 (Spring 2026)

May 31, 2026

A mosaic of blues, greens, golds, and red on a peacock blue background.
Image credit: Harmony by Nafia Syeed

My Co-Worker is Fasting for Gaza & I Just

By Courtney LeBlanc

stop looking at the news, can’t stomach the daily horror. He’s my favorite person in the office. Once, in a meeting, we simultaneously broke into song—Smack That by Akon—and this sealed our friendship: a Black, Muslim man and a white atheist woman. He’s fasting because he works for the military machine, the same one supplying guns and ammo and fighter jets to Israel, which continues to pummel Gaza. He says it’s all he can do; he’s fasting in solidarity. Once, in college, I fasted for some good cause, but really, it was just a socially acceptable way to starve myself for two days. Back then, I couldn’t think beyond my own body, its incessant hunger, couldn’t look at the world’s horror when I was so consumed by the horror I encountered each day on the scale, in the mirror. On Sunday, a woman cut off a man in traffic, and he rammed her car off the road, came at her with a knife, killed her and her dog. It shut down the four-lane highway that rings my city. The cop who arrived shot him, killed him. Horror rings my city. Once, at the bus stop outside my office, a man went after the driver and one of the passengers with a knife. The cops shot and killed him too. I walked home that afternoon, the day’s horror chasing me the whole way. My office is famous, once the largest building in the world. Once, five angry men flew a plane into it. That day I watched the news. We all did. We couldn’t look away.

Courtney LeBlanc (she/her) is the author of the four full-length collections, most recently Her Dark Everything and Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize). She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate Emerita and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She’s also the founder of the Poetry Coven, a monthly generative workshop. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com.