Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole says,

“My hope is this will be the community’s police station”

and every inch of black girl resistance in me becomes a tremor becomes palpitation of heart and earth,

a bullet in barrel,

Earth’s crust eager to rift itself into a beast that breathes fire.

Experts say,

a .9 earthquake will hit Seattle within the century.

Police union says it needs a new facility able to endure eventual catastrophe and I think


if cops need building material,

there’s nothing more able to endure fission than a black or brown body.

There’s nothing that holds up guilt, greed, and excess more than a back that is used to being broken,

but I’m glad

I get a seat at a table I’ve set

A community space a floor above a shooting range:

a court to practice the de-escalation technique of killing people who look like my family Thank you, officer, for this concession.

Capital will never become full enough to not steal the fruits of our labor. Will never sacrifice beyond what it can get away with spitting up. Capital

harvests stolen crop

until mouth twists into gallant smile, blood on leaves and blood at root Strange

Fruit

O’Toole wants the new precinct host a farmers market.

What can grow in a fortress besides a pedestal to hang a noose? What good is a community that bonds over lynching?

Is this what a safe city looks like?

Is this

Emerald City progressive showing us the man behind the curtain and expecting us to pay no mind?

Government ain't the wizard we hoped

but a coward pretending to be better than he is

Is this the fraud I'm expected to call progressive?

Is this the shooting range I am expected to call my community?

Tell me,

O’Toole

What's a new precinct to Oscar Perez’s grieving family?

What's a new bunker to the 10,000 homeless people in Seattle besides another place they can't live in?

This is excessive force

of the most insidious kind

I don't know which will hurt me first:

a building collapse or a cop mistaking my mother’s body for a weapon Either way

I know whose lives matter in this city

and it's not black lives.

Seattle is prepared for us to die

Seattle making a refuge for people who already get away with killing us, too.

Insurrection will be the next major disaster this city faces

Will resurface all the lies and empty promises it was told

Pulse from the streets up, radiate the heat of magma Molotov and bitter history, no longer latent and cowering,

but surging, dangerous, and revolutionary.

We will be hammer to the coffin of every cruel and fragile thing that has wronged us and tool to every dream we want to build in its place

A table where capitalism is not welcome

A city my mother can feel safe in

A city where all lives actually matter

Where hands reach out to hold mine instead of to the gun in its holster

I know

it's hard to stay hopeful

in times where death seems to lurk around every corner But we are unstoppable

and another world is growing within us

I am prepared to fight

for a community

That is real

Azura Tyabji is our February Poet in Residence.



Previously: Missing Persons Report Filed for the Knife of Charleena Lyles: June 18, 2017, and Healing in Golden Repair.