There are things they want you to believe— that lie:
I am not here. But I am here in the way I have spoken
the names of living things to your children.

In the way I show them how to feel rage and grief in their body
ask them is it in your heart? Is it in the palms of your
hands? Is it behind your eyes? I always feel rage

from the depths of my chest to the wells of my cheeks
a slow fire ready to burst. Grief is its cousin, but colder;
caught in the throat, a barrier for speech.

I am trying to find the words but they all feel wrong.
What can you say when rage and grief have
made their home in your body each day?

How long can a fire burn and cool and silence
until you are nothing but a memory? They
want to erase our memory. Erasing memory is

another way to extinguish a future. A generation
of futures will be extinguished if we cannot find our voices.
I am trying to find my voice. It lives behind my eyes,

It lives in the soles of my feet. Every day I let myself
sink into some sort of earth and allow myself to feel it.
I am letting myself feel and it is too much. A wave, a

murmuration, an agony, an apocalypse of the body;
of the heart. I open my phone and the world ends,
I close my eyes and the world ends. I look for

unmarked cars and a world I may never know
ends. What can you build in a world marked by ending?
what can you build from the rubble of a life

that was never yours to begin with?
What do you own when everything can be taken away?
Who do you belong to? I am a child of

children. I am a child of a mother. I am a survivor
of great violence. We are all surviving great violence.
I want to close my eyes but a world in darkness is

not a world at all. I want to turn away, but when the violence
ends, what is there to return to? I love the world
and I wish it would love me back. I love who I love

and this love is the purest form of living. I am alive
and this America wants me dead. I wish, more than anything
That I could love America without the threat of an extinguishing.

What is a voice if not a vehicle for breath?
What is a future if not a desperate dream of survival?
I am desperate to survive with you.

You, long laborer of hands and heart.
You, gardener of words and legacy.
You, undocumented, unspoken, unknown.

You, namemaker, hopefinder, revolutionary.
We are standing here on the precipice of what
We have called America and We are afraid.

We are here with bellies full of grief and rage and fire
Of unspeakable hope in the face of a future that
Feels impossibly dark. We, children of Christ,

Allah, the universe, America.
All of us, hand in trembling hand
Unwilling to be silent.

Lift your voices now,
America
I want to hear you sing.

~