She’s been sitting in the passenger seat of my car for a week.
She won’t wear her seatbelt and she won’t come in at night.
She’s been sitting in the passenger seat of my car for a week.
She won’t wear her seatbelt and she won’t come in at night.
The pounding in Amana’s temples won’t let up, and it’s beginning to scare her. She has had headaches before, but this is something different—it feels like some kind of creature has invaded her body and is occupying every square inch of it, from the tips of her fingers, which won’t stop tingling, to the pit of her stomach, which feels like it is being stretched and twisted and kneaded like bread dough.
We are the easy targets
to the men who hide behind
the thin veil of life
the men in Washington
who pretend that they care.
It’s nice to scream
“This is what democracy looks like”
With a hundred people you’ve never met before.
Of course we knew what was at stake.
We all had that pill between our teeth
the gelatin cap
would not burst
no matter how hard we bit down
My daughter calls from upstate where they sell gray gourds.
She says things are happening too fast, says we’re fucked.
In today’s society, we often take great pleasure in putting down our enemies. One especially fun way to do that is to compare them to despised or disgusting things. If a teacher is too strict, the he or she is like a boring BDSM master or mistress. If a roommate is lazy, then he or she is a useless pile of crap. Because both of my parents worked in education, my natural enemy is the Republican Party. And so, to get in on the fun, I will say that the current Republican Party is like Keyser Soze from the film The Usual Suspects.
Dead Democrats scratch their bones
and wait but there’s no real time to roll over.
The caskets closed, no reason to push open
wooden tops against dirt, heavy
A man,
prostrate,
fingers on his hands splayed
spat gum engrained
in the lines of his fingerprints.
I am here cuz I am too Mexican for Americans too American
for Mexicans & too feminine for masculine, I am here cuz even as bodies keep dropping
jails keep maxing & whites keep robbing, these large brown hands with nail polish
will rise & fist up for freedom for revenge for tradition & for that little queer brown boi
that has yet to be born.
The business man will sign his name
a certain number of times in his long,
dry-cleaned life. $500 pens in his breast
pocket. How many signatures?
Others take his measure.
Not even a Cyclops can stop him from shoving
folks out of his way, cutting to the front of the line.
A master of the proxy fight and poison pill,
his greenmail raids are sure to kill or leave enemies
quaking, immured in handcuffs of tarnished gold.
Da press secretary is deflecting
so many pertinent questions
dat you could almost visualize
da force field dat surrounds him
I emerge from ashes like beast
because it’s September something
& I haven’t smiled since January
since backstabbing amigas tried
to take me down since Notre Dame
we are
star-spangled
& we are
earning our stripes
About a week after it all happened, a friend of mine texted me. He said he needed to talk.
I’d known Chris since the late 90s, when I lived in Salt Lake City Utah. Chris now lives in Nevada, in Las Vegas with his boyfriend. It’s not really relevant but they broke up in January sometime over increasing tension in their household. Chris’ boyfriend hadn’t voted in the election. It wasn’t something Chris could let go.
Hi, other white guys. I know that we see each other all the time, but we don’t really talk about stuff, you know? Rock music, maybe, football, sure, but not serious stuff. I know that that sounds weird or like I’m going to hassle you, but it looks like a lot of us have made a mistake. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a hard time about slavery. That was bad, for sure, but it’s not really my place to talk to you about that.
When a group of young men
surround you outside of the bar
and it's late and you're alone
don't react when they call you
a faggot
My mirror could have lied
but it chose not to.
I asked it sweetly, slowly
to change for me
to change me
into something free and vital,
pale and careless,
white as snow and unburdened song.
To take a knee through history
takes bravery.
To stay down
when they came with the whips.