writing keeps me here,
keeps my nerves awake, alive.
through my skin, they scrape the sky
like branches, like leaves

We sit in the conference,
trying to be inconspicuous at first,
while security glares at us,
our clothes too wrinkled.

The man on the microphone
talks about our side
the way we talk about their side.
"They are taking our rights away.
We have to fight back,"
he says,
heart-felt,
And I don't like sides.
And I don't believe in them.
but I wonder for a moment
if we are just their opposite,
their symmetry,
and that is all.

The man with the microphone has a story,
I think,
and his story wrote his speech,
and my story gave birth to this moment,
to my short hair and thrift store shirt,
to this chant inside my head
that I'll shout in an hour.
We all come from stories, I think.

But then I think of the border,
a line drawn by Power,
onto bodies.
And I think of the stories
I have heard and read
of those who crossed it.

The desert is a myth to me,
but to my friends,
it is a memory
they were forced to face.

To stumble from the desert into prison,
into tents too hot to breathe,
into a "concentration camp"--

This suffering doesn't have a side.
It doesn't have a politic.
It has a beating heart.
It has a story.
It has a voice.

And so we will stand up and shout
when the sheriff is speaking,
even though we are shaking,
even though we know we will be tackled to the ground.

We will be dragged away,
a sheet over our head,
and we will shout.

Not because there is a line
in my heart
between us and them,
but because we don't let lines silence suffering.

The border has tall walls,
but still,
it is not solid because it stands on living earth.
The border wavers like our strength.
The border shivers like our hands.
The border gives birth like our stories.
And so we shout.

At first,
she'd fumble for the words sometimes
or stumble in the hallway,
but now when she gets up at night,
and I wake suddenly somehow after 2 flat shuffles,
and rush in to help her to the bathroom,
she yells a dadaist poem at me,
her finger pointed at my chest.
"And the, the what! And the you! And the book! You oughta!"
She is all exclamation points,
her mouth a toothless snarl.
I imagine William S. Burroughs taking furious notes in the corner,
but i know she means to say,
"how dare you wake up at 4am
to help me
when you are my grand-daughter?
And even though I don't have words anymore,
I worry about you,
and I am supposed to take care of you.
and I am ashamed things are so backwards, now."

She is always furrowed, now.
I cannot comfort her.
Even in her sleep, she asks loudly,
"Am I alright? Is everything alright? I don't know. I just don't know."
She calls for help, but doesn't know why by the time I arrive from the next room.
I guess wildly, as she grows impatient.
Sometimes her hair feels too heavy on her neck,
Sometimes the painting on the wall is crooked,
but mostly it is something else she just can't put her finger on,
a knowing that life--
which so diligently held her so steady for 96 years,
as she sat at her sewing machine and hosted dinner parties in regal pant suits--
has given up and gone askew,
like the ground in a pinball machine,
and she is lost in perpetual motion,
wandering its back alleyways,
everything familiar but nothing quite right.

I tell myself I am here to care for her,
to bear witness, and honor her process
of dying,
as if I am somehow above it,
outside her strange-smelling world,
looking on.
But when I am with her,
I cannot help but be reminded of my own mind, my own life,
also estranged from me,
also suspended.

I cannot help but wonder what went wrong.

sometimes i think
the whole world is built on NO
a NO you can sink your teeth into,
a NO you can pull up by its roots,
a NO you can tear up into pieces
and stomp into the ground,
like someone else's history

But humans have great capacities.
Filled with sadness, they do not burst.

Not bursting, they make coffee
and ride the bus to work.
Not bursting, they band their bodies into circles,
together, and talk things through,

the memories and contradictions gathered in their throats,
like rain on concrete,
unable to reach earth.

i am a NO.
we make a NO with our bodies.