The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation…
-Augusto Boal
1
1.
There is something strangely intimate
about meeting in each other’s
kitchens,
bedrooms,
closets,
homes…
I have seen partners
violins
pillows
and plants;
I have heard
chickens
trash compactors
cigarettes;
crying questioning yearning.
Someone put on her pants during our meeting.
Someone else did not.
There is something strangely violent
About teaching in this new way;
our bodies are reduced to square shapes moving indiscriminately around other squares
gaining and losing focus;
sometimes the northern lights appear
a wave rolls by
we enter outer space;
sometimes a child seeks comfort,
a cat resists it,
a dog barks.
There is something strangely comforting about
teaching social work on zoom.
There are microinterventions and virtual meditations;
chats that appear in the quietest moments as if to ignite the whole room with hope;
questions that someone is suddenly brave enough to pose
from their bedroom
their kitchen
their closet
that resists unstable internet connections and disconnected audio
that forces us back out of the boxes of our bodies
out of the silence of group mute
out of the isolation
and into this
strange space
together.
2.
And also,
Zoom looks good on me.
The bags under my eyes are softened;
the redness almost imperceptible.
The tendons that are screaming and pulling and aching in my arms
go unobserved.
The scent of salonpas patches lining my low back—
medicinal but oddly comforting, familial,
familiar—
offends no one, and keeps our work airspace clear, clean.
How many things are unseen
or unseeable?
What are we hiding?
3.
the light has shifted and suddenly the room seems dark
there is no virtual background that will mask this shift
no invisibility cloak for the classist racist gendered pathways
this pandemic is plowing
we are furloughing
we are gaslighting
we are voting for a prop
o-sition
trying to put ourselves in the position
of hope.
we are gardening as if it were a necessity
rather than a pastime
(my hands are buried in the soil, daily
they feel cool
held by the earth
we ask so much of her)
skills have shifted
the games have changed
and some
more than others
are winning.
4.
As a researcher, performative writing is exposing, and can be at once terrifying and electrifying. It puts me on the line in a way that feels correct in a queer, decolonial project. Poetry helps us to remember our embodied knowing, it can be a tool for storytelling, or it can simply provide a moment of reflection and reprieve. Maybe we smile. Maybe we sigh.
5.
It only takes a spark.
cities can burn.
stomachs are churning.
years and hours and days of funerals eulogies lynchings beatings
grief cries
ENOUGH.
I hear you.
I feel it.
systems
like glass
shattering
built on bodies like bridges
black and brown red and yellow bricks
tumbling crumbling
hurtling themselves through storefronts
we can not breathe.
It only takes a spark.
we are seeking;
(still seeking!? How can we not have given up hope?)
we are marching;
we haven’t stopped.
As congressmen uses their bodies as weapons,
(although as a woman I know they always have)
infectious with lies,
(although as a queer I know they always try)
contagious with fear,
(although as a child of an immigrant I know they’ve always been)
and politicians scream
“FUCK!” into to the ether,
and white men shout into black men’s faces:
“I AM NOT YOUR ALLY” as they smash windows like hope,
kapos sa hininga,
(we are running out of breath)
and I am remembering that it only takes a spark.
I listened to my students on day one week one
single moms first responder’s crisis workers preventing suicides
in their bathrooms
behind curtains
in their bedrooms
during naptime
between phone calls to unemployment for ninetieth time that week
“assignments are optional”
I blurted out
not entirely without thought—
other (tenured) womyn of color are leading this cause—
but a blearier moment
than I pictured
stumbling toward liberation
and yet, on week nine they are looking for the slip
knot
the un-promise
the catch
they describe defend are defeated by their circumstances
as they opt-out of the paperpowerpointdiscussionpostfinalprojectgrade
and I try to respond as quickly as I can: catch your breath!!
it. is. okay.
today the system will not harm you.
(not this system, anyway.)
It always takes a spark.
