It is two weeks to spring break and blood is running in the streets again.
My phone is heavy in my back pocket, text from a friend: How are you?
A man killed himself yesterday, I reply.
—but how can I say that? A man set himself on fire sixteen streets away from where I am walking to class, and I am walking to class—
this city is a new London three hundred and fifty-eight years later, this nation a new Rome cleaved apart from the inside;
people are chanting as the country eats itself alive, ouroboros scarfing its own tail,
and we are ready to ignite.
II.
Four hours later, among the bleary flickering of candle flames over pools of pearly liquidized wax, I am thinking of the words spoken during my first month in this city—
a bus driver, dismissive, entertained even:
Welcome to Washington, where people are paid to tell lies.
He savors the acrid taste of truth on his tongue, biting back the urge to spit a second warning: you’re the ones who pay them, whether you like them or not—
they can ruin your lives, they can abolish your rights, and you will obediently lick the blood from their hands—
they will veto your dying screams for ceasefire, turn away, blind, to their military brutality,
they will look at you here, crouching on the concrete, draped in your keffiyeh with your grocery store flowers, and they will extinguish your candles one by one,
they will call the man who burned here mentally ill, because sacrifice for one’s country was supposed to mean complicity—
not this, not this resistance, not this protestation, not immolation—
imperialism, soldier, that’s what we pay you to do;
imperialism, student, so stop inspecting your media—there are no shards of truth here for you to polish into hope—
stop believing that your “rights” mean anything on private property—it’s not police violence if it’s on school grounds, not if it’s against you,
you rebels, you rioters, you anarchists: terrorists,
you university optimists with your bright eyes and black futures—
this is what the ruling class has decided will be normal now: we will burn ourselves alive and take the country down with us.
I take out my phone, type out a last-ditch response:
how many more of us will die before they listen?
