He makes breakfast. I hold genocide.
Hi friends, I've been writing and polishing essay after essay here in July, but I've been unable to press Publish for the past three weeks. There's something fully mysterious and magic about being a writer when I let there be. I've decided to let there be. It doesn't matter what the whole human world tells me I should do. My writing ancestors and goddesses and muses and my heart won't let me click Publish unless I'm bringing my full self. That is to say, it finally occurred to me that I don't want to be writing and sharing essays this month. I want to be writing poetry. Or, maybe, that poetry is demanding to be written and she's found me– a willing playmate. Poetry insists that I let go of more ego and individual control in favor of finding what we actually need together. Poetry can hold everything that an essay cannot possibly hold, because essays still insist that I remain a bit sane when everything around me feels insane. Poetry prefers reality.
So, here's the 3-part poem I wrote this morning when I woke up. Unpolished. Messy. Unapologetic for existing strangely. Just like me now.
He makes breakfast. I hold genocide.
1. There
you know things are bad
when progressive poets scream
set down all devices
pick up the Goddamn mic
and say something! anything!
Don't be silent!
It’s a good question though:
what do you say
what do you write
what do you do
when your government
your representatives
your supreme court
your border patrol and military
the west herself, an entire direction to go in
are all behaving like the actual devil?
But your Mom is still in memory care
unable to move and needing hands to hold
and your hands are some of the only hands
showing up to hold hers.
what do you say
Don’t keep calm
when aid distribution teams,
Don’t carry on
when doctors, mothers, and children
Don’t look away
are being hunted like
what?
Divest
I’m tempted to say animals
Boycott
hunted like animals
Protest
but we would never do this to animals
Strike
not at this scale
Muck up all fascist wheels and plans
not with "elected" "leaders" and cosplaying "soldiers"
Drop surveillance apps and platforms
Go analog
Tap into great grandma recipe-box wisdom
and, yuck, cross-wearing "government" spokespeople
Protest. Stop cruelty wherever you encounter it.
Especially within.
lying-nonstop mouths
Gather and organize and learn and reimagine.
Speak every experience and truth you feel and see.
puss festering wounds of the spirit
Empathize, listen to your body
Attend town halls, speak, protect the vulnerable
with your body. When you are vulnerable
accept, become, sanctuary together. Be messy together.
Rest.
foaming at their cruel mouths like rabid
dead-eyed
what? dogs?
but dogs would never do this
not at this scale
dogs wouldn't act this way
not unless chronically abused and backed into a corner
certainly not with Trump bibles in their hands and
gold crosses around their lying necks
and cheap knock-off gold shoes on their feet
dogs would never allow the deluded and cruel to be responsible for justice
dogs know better and so do we
what can you write
what do you say
what can you do
when friends, neighbors, and aid distribution teams
are slaughtered for sport
just like
Palestinian children?
dismissed with clueless, abused, and privileged or lied-to glee + fury
dismissed like life-long civil servants, teachers, veterans, park rangers, disabled folks, healthcare workers, unions, elders on Medicaid, and scientists?
disappeared daily
like native women, nonbinary folks, trans people, refugees and immigrants in the U.S., and people who have tattoos or who just look like immigrants?
what the actual fuck is that racist nonsense?
when families are being caged, tortured, shrunk
like citizens of
and visitors to
the United States?
when the wealthy keep golfing
and shopping and traveling and smiling or judging
while billions of good people are intentionally
ground down by poverty and
intentionally wounded and imprisoned and murdered
while temperatures, flood waters
and wildfires rise
and our kids now watch genocide
and mass shootings
daily on their phones or in person
while we bow to corporate bosses
and play endless games
trying to escape?
Let go into who we really are
we're totally fucked, yet finally all in
and in this together.
Share everything you are and
everything you have
to find joy or rest here. Stop giving free passes
to the greedy and pulling punches for abusive men.
Poor people know so much better. Women do too.
This is the human way.
these tiny-hearted regimes
these proud-pedophile con men
these sad, lonely cowards who believe con men but NEVER BELIEVE WOMEN except botox-brained twisted Barbie women but only when they parrot con men
these builders of for-profit cages for families
these billionaire parasites without empathy or perspective
and us:
disconnected, isolated, perpetually distracted, afraid
the horror
the horror
the horror
the horror
- Here
it’s late July
the sky is blue
we just bought new mattresses
for family who can't even visit
Some days I look at my phone and can’t for the life of me
understand
why the forests and oceans
and all the people I love
aren’t screaming or organizing.
There are so many ghosts around now
that sometimes I wonder
if we're already dead.
people, spirits, smiles, rights, freedoms
are being snuffed out like candles
everywhere now
and joy, when you want it here
can mostly be found
in the words of dead poets,
true friendships, trees, and children
thank you, dead poets, friends, trees, children
living poets, well
we are starving
bleeding
scattering
hiding
screaming
trying to find a moment's rest
burning in tents and schools and hospitals
choking on genocidal gas
empathetic bodies taking daily sniper fire now– on purpose
so nobody falls and suffers alone– and
daily rounding up by masked men
like brown people
at the jobs, and schools, and churches, and parks and
on U.S. streets and in the halls of justice, halls of lies
and we're writing, asking trees and ancestors for advice, and
plotting
like everyone else
learning
like everyone else
how to somehow rest and figure out how to transmit
joy
from killing fields
abduction-zone parking lots and court rooms
jail cells
for-profit prisons
kidnap vans and
graves
while buried beneath lies
We're learning to find hope
in a global compost heap of all children,
women, nonbinary beings, brown bodies, and sensitive beings—
those flying kites, those feeding and sheltering others,
those forced to donate their beloved arms,
legs, eyes, parents, children, whole cities, and land
to utterly lost and violent men:
men utterly terrified– of what?
whole women, whole children
whole nonbinary beings, whole families,
whole communities?
terrified of people who know
that land is kin
and that we are, too?
Why must they damage or destroy everyone who belongs here?
- Home
My husband likely wonders
why I’m staying in bed an hour later
in the mornings now,
why he so often eats breakfast alone
Should I tell him
that I hold all the small lost hands
massage all the lonely feet
separated forever
from their own children in Gaza?
Do I tell him that
women and poets hold intentionally starved
children in our hearts and bodies
the way he holds his bowl
of heart-healthy oatmeal
in his hands?
Do I tell him that poets
wrap our hearts and souls
around all hunted and tortured and
disappeared families and friends
and disappearing rights
the world over?
So that we can become exponentially wider and freer together
when freedoms and precious lives
are striped away? Disappeared?
Because bad men have never stopped doing this? Never.
So we have never stopped learning how to do this.
I love him, I do
but I can’t tell him that.
I can’t ask him to hold what I was so clearly born to hold.
He's not built for it.
He’s a good man, though,
so he cooks and does yard work
and he cleans and walks the dog
and hand makes tortillas, and he even leads
other men to better places and
occasional spontaneous
getaways for us
to lift my spirits.
He knows what I hold.
He knows.
He doesn’t need me to speak
millions of intentionally murdered and disappeared
women and children
1.8 million people being intentionally starved right now or
59,000 held in concentration camps in the U.S. today
while the world is forced to our knees to watch and scream
like a whole planet of children being tortured on Epstein Island
all still being paid for by our hard work and tax dollars–
he doesn't need me to speak it
not out loud
he knows that whenever I try, I weep.
Sensitive to what's appropriate now:
I weep. Sensitive to what's appropriate here with me:
he does just about everything else now
so that I don't have to weep all the time.
It's not fair but I can't decide to whom anymore.
Doesn't seem fair to anyone.
Maybe that’s why the bad men need us now
in small bloody parts and with our hearts
and bodies in tiny cages or hiding at home too scared to go outside and
our voices silenced and even our bodies themselves taken away from us?
Because good men
are changing sides
in droves now.
Good men are
finding true strength not in people
so disconnected from life that they blow up children
ignore women, disappear families for sport
insist that nonbinary and trans folks aren't even here,
demand complete loyalty to lying dictators and con men
while still trying to hide all pain and suffering, including their own–
good men are finally
finally
finally
finding true strength
in all of the people
who hold them together.
In all of us.
So.
He makes breakfast.
I hold genocide.
He holds me.
I hold us.
Community is all of us now.
Community is everyone attacked and belittled for just trying to live
and just trying to belong.
Everyone who just wants to be free.
