On January 19, 2025, the Trump administration restricted federal agencies and universities from use of words considered “woke.”
brighten the words activist, all-inclusive, climate
crisis, the moon that knows who endures
disease, snowmelt, wildfire. Imagine it rained crates of
equity, open-framed and sheathing (from a sky that’s surely
female), engendering a Gulf of Mexico storm, en-
gendering the abundant brilliance of Black.
Historically speaking, there are ghosts in waters, and, on land,
immigrant, immigrant, immigrant, that’s one in eight U.S. citizens.
Just like hope, like clean energy, there have been
key populations turning pages of bell hooks’ All About
Love: women, men, LGBT, LGBTQ, they/them, the
most risk children and the elderly, bodies excluded on the
news. Somewhere there is a god who waits, who knows the
orientation of our galaxy, the crowd of stars, is a braid of
people pregnant with possibility.
Question, quicken,
race to the polls for advocacy, and as for
sex, studies show those with more sexually-conservative values
trend more sexually deviant in practice than their more
universally, sexually-liberal peers. This is the other
victim, language itself, a song, a salve, a
weapon, a tool. It’s the desert snake, spine in its mouth, the
xerotyphlops’ blind hiss. It burrows slender as a cursive
y, the tail curving slightly to the left,
navigating the sands with resistance.
