Stay and Fight

The sun was coming out, and steam rose up off every jutting muddy piece of the land, which sparkled in a great show of democracy. A discarded truck bumper shone just like the sandstone, just like a scrap of metallic insulation and the white of yarrow flowers and the flash of blue jays’ wings, a coil of chicken wire, an old license plate half entombed in mud.

The ones that belong in jail are rarely the ones you see in there.

We preferred to imagine ourselves on the right side of things, including history. We preferred to stand side by side, thinking despising thoughts about people who were long dead and the mistakes that they’d made, instead of thinking despising thoughts about one another and about the mistakes we were right now making each moment.

In times of trauma, you bring fast food. It’s designed so that even people who aren’t hungry will eat. You’ll smell this and your body will start eating even while your mind and heart are not eating.

And so the talk turned to the many disappointments and hardships of the lives we were living, and how once you got rid of one thing, another thing was sure to turn up, and how this succession of pests, irritations, and unfairness would surely last until we were too weary to move, and so lay down on the lush water-laden land, lay down to rest, just to rest, lay down and died.

If you think the civil rights movement is over, you're the one who's out of touch, not me.