Poems For the First Days
I'm the [girl] with the poetry power. I'm the [girl] who smells like flowers.
If we’re FB friends or you follow me on Instagram you’ve possibly seen photos this week of my furiously scratched-out poems. While feeling helpless about what’s to come, I found myself turning to the words of other poets. From them, I’ve received a modicum of comfort and some education. So I’m trying to put more of that into the world while emptying poison thoughts from my head.
Here are the poems so far. Please be careful and act with love. Share any of these if you’re moved to do so.
11.6.24 When does an idea die? When it's misinterpreted by over half of the people? Or does it have to burn? 250-year old ink, stained by the Red, Brown, and Black blood spilled in centuries past? In decades before our birth? Last week? My county tis of thee, What the fuck is wrong with you? It's always been like this beyond the gaze of privilege. America, full of promises like a new lover whose serpent tongue can be ignored when it feels so good. He leaves your shocked, calls you a whore, leaves you naked on bare bedsprings with no one to clean you. Hate knows no country. It emerges from the guts, suffocating rational ideas we think are law. So does love.
11.7.24 "So how, exactly, did his last presidency hurt you personally?" I didn't point out what I thought was obvious. I'm a middle-class women with a queer kid and elderly parents. This is plenty. I said instead that it didn't have to hurt me personally, and that doesn't matter because I give a fuck about other people. I escorted myself out before I could say, "Hey, weren't you the guy we all saw beating off at that party in high school?" Because I give a fuck about other people.
11/8/24 When I had a little girl a little boy once cornered her alone on the playground. She turned her pale little hand— the one she traced into a Thanksgiving turkey and mashed into wet clay— into a ball and punched him in the face. He let her go. I didn't know about this until a decade later when the same boy, now a foot taller then my kid and 100 pounds heavier kept distracting her in science class. "So I told him, 'I bloodied your nose once. I'll do it agan.'" And he stopped. The teacher who didn't rat out the little girl will be a counterculture hero now that little boys say, "Her body, my choice."
11/9/24 I saw a rainbow stretched across my windshield, bold against gun metal sky. I thought maybe it's a sign of hope, of promise, and I smiled until I followed a curve and my rainbow wavered. Maybe it's as permanent as 1982 rainbow stickers on a Trapper Keeper or Manic Panic at the end of June. But it returned and so did a fraction of my hope until I drove over the line into poverty-rotted, Black East St. Louis. There are no rainbows here.
