When I was in grade school I had a teacher
and she told me that peace, was in my hands,
well not just my hands, I’m not that clumsy,
never have my dance steps in order,
even when numbered,
but my hands get slick with nerves, I guess
what she was saying was that the laying
of hands makes up a government, the way
that picking up your arms dissolves one.
There’s many ways to die,
and they all involve the government.
In days away from the men that I love,
the men I see revolutionary empathy
in, well, the tracks don’t separate
allies like they do in John Hughes
movies, where one must find confirmation
in a shared pop-culture vocabulary.
Instead, finding solidarity, love, in the embrace
of the men, that are bowed, but unbroken,
breaking bread with my boys
and getting a little punchy with the whiskey
and ask the bourgeois to step out with me.
Happenstance and fate, they get caught
up in the doors of crosstown platforms
and the overdubs take over
the New York City air.
Half a glass
deep, and already
giggling. It gets late.
The goodbyes take half an hour.
The borders are closing tonight
and so are the mouths
standing around an ashtray.
The votes are still stalling.
‘Til things go back to normal, I’m mixing
weed and wine, winds keep whispering
empire, and the votes keep coming in
secure. Tommy keeps telling me things
are secure. Things are better,
that the grassroots, still revolting,
against the sun, continue to react
and create our own reality, we being
history’s actors, with fumbling hands.
The governor announces yet another
thing. The goodbyes take forever.
The ghosts they call
and they make appointments
and I take notes to remind myself
to call my friends, parents, aunts
in factories before the holidays.
The goodbyes take half an hour.
Ryan Thoresen Carson is a community organizer and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. His featured poems come from his manuscript titled An Admittedly Sinking Yacht, which he sees as a meditation on loss and creation in the age of climate change.
IG and Twitter: @ryantcarson
This poem’s featured image was created by visual artist, Alexander Haristhal.