When the riots began, Svitafi was sipping halfheartedly at the flavorless tea her mother, Amari, had poured.

The old tablet mounted on the table suddenly vibrated, jarring the tense air. Amari jumped, dropped a mug of tea. The screen flashed a warning message, accompanied by a shrill, tinny alarm: Riots in east Senja district - avoid Mathawin factory area. Remain inside and avoid disrupting security operations.

“Oh, no,” Amari said. Stepped over the spilled tea and silenced the alarm. “Luro...

In these times, we face an increasing crisis of dehumanization, both interpersonal and systemic, driven largely by the capitalist society we live in. As well as everyday impacts, dehumanization has direct implications for our response to the climate crisis; the less responsibility or solidarity we feel for the most dehumanized and vulnerable among us--who experience first and worst the impacts of climate change--the less we will feel the urgency of protecting the planet.
    A point where dehumanization is enacted very...

Link to video performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG9zGhiLxu4

~~~~~~~~

Text of poem

Letter to the children I will not have

i have started to offer silent apologies
to every child i see
you are two years old,
a cherub smiling on the train on the way to a baseball game
-- i am sorry
you are four and beaming out of a photograph, a car seat, a phone screen
-- i am sorry
maybe my bones carry a scant decade more than yours ...

Kvelur is a word for skies like dryer lint and bruises, when you tip your head back and see only a dull purple, a heavy, stony color even in the middle of the night. Light pollution is ironic because it requires the judgment that not all light is innocent or good. It means we’ve saturated the sky with so much artificial brightness that I can't see the glitters I was looking for, the stars. We’ve broken the window into the...

Fire, smoke, screams, and the sky reclaimed the Predator. 

(Far away, the pilot squinted at the smoke through fuzzy screens and wondered if there was enough Xanax left to sleep tonight.)

In the crosshairs, the crime was signed in blood on scarred sand, its shattering pain writ in the char of bodies. A watching child sobbed. 

After, as life retreated towards normal (sort of--smiles scarcer, graves more abundant, forgiveness less easy, a feeling more somber), he would remember his brothers...

Oh, let it never be again
We are broken glass bleeding in the wreckage of what we build
Grief  rends me weeping and hollow, dredging my saltwater heart
It was never supposed to be this way

We are broken glass bleeding in the wreckage of what we build
On our shoulders we find the weight and seethe of our history
It was never supposed to be this way
The knowledge writ in blood that we are still not free

On...

    Were I to accept what I heard in history class at school recently, I would believe that the US once flirted with imperialism and then rejected it like a scandalized schoolgirl, scurrying back to isolationism, which eventually gave way to our reluctant role as a global sheriff. Sounds nice. But this reluctant-and-benign-superpower narrative is useless, unfortunately, for understanding current events and the evolution and effects of US foreign policy. And the  redacted version of history we learn in school is,...

    Today I was standing in my kitchen, gulping mango juice so fast it seared my throat with cold, and when I finished the bottle, I blinked at it sadly. Where had my juice gone? Had I enjoyed it, at least? Had I even thought about it as I was drinking it?
    Probably not. I was focused on downing the glass as fast as possible so I could get on to more important things. And my point isn't that I shall...