Poems in the Pandemic

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.