hold steady

I was taught you have to pull violence out by its root 
to shake loose its invasive spread 

I was taught to see the raised reflection of boarding schools in stories of native family pain, 
to see the remnants in a black mothers’ eyes of training babies to evade the master

I was taught the haunting of white women’s betrayals bare the torch of a witch hunt and white knuckled supremacy spits the creak of a breaking wheel

I recognize the crouched never again of my people’s fingers clinging to a detonator 


last week my uncle told me a childhood story i hadn’t heard before, my bubi’s fist fell so hard in her son’s cheek his head hit the rim of the bathtub on the way down, threats raining…. if he dared skip school again…. snares of insistence it was for his own good,

when the words “I probably deserved it” splintered his recollection I felt the cold bloom of the shadow of genocide 


the gas chambers counted on us terrorizing ourselves long after their pipes were sealed, and they counted on our brokenness lined up behind theirs, enlisted in their impossibility of any reality except killers and the annihilated

their final solution to the too soft human ache for the fertile sweetness of living,
triumphs when we transplant their hard hearts into ours

it is not just that Gaza deserves to live

it is not just that Palestine deserves to be free

but that our only hope of returning 
to ourselves, lies in being able to recognize
the vulnerable cry of a people
deciding to stay
cradles no danger, but rather a compass
a welcome

home is belonging to the crude and jumbled luster that is all life
home is belonging to the crude and jumbled luster that is all life