Step 1. Show up on Inauguration Night

Leave your pretensions at home this time,

you will not be saving anyone here.

There is a surge of black-clad bodies that will quickly take your stubborn

Berniecrat and I’m With Her shirts out of fashion.

You have a bleeding heart

pinned to your sleeve by a safety pin

Huffington Post told you to wear it

Your well-meaning aunt told you,

with the force of a whole rich neighborhood association’s facebook group behind her, that this

tiny piece of metal

will save the poor and wretched

welcome them to your teeming shore —

No.

Don’t get caught up in pretensions.

Step 2. When you see notorious white supremacist Richard Spencer being interviewed by the news,

make sure your safety pin is visible.

Wait for a poor, victimized Person of Color to approach you for help.

You’ll grow so tired

of waiting for an opportunity to show off your allyship you might learn something.

Step 3. Here is the hard part

While Richard Spencer is talking about the Pepe the Frog pin on his lapel

his face

will be interviewed by a fist instead.

He, all bigotry, hair gel, and bloated pride

stumbles from the well-placed blow, lands on the concrete a couple yards away

Suddenly, the assailant’s fist is Lady Liberty’s torch, blazing a trail for us to march on.

Suddenly

we are all the fist

humiliating white supremacy at its own inauguration.

In the universe of this small victory,

no one is president.

No cop tear gasses a restaurant without resistance

and bigotry

bleeds from biting its own eager tongue again.

Someone punches Richard Spencer and hope blooms a tangible thing in me.

Hundreds of miles away

I breathe just a little easier>

so before you yell,

“just sign a change.org petition!”

Think of how long we have been waiting.

How you say,

“we’ll survive these four years”

as if we

have not been trying to survive for centuries.

Think of you love watching us swallow when we want to spit.

Pressure hosing a panther and reprimanding her when she bites.

Think of how you pulled the nine inch knife out six inches, stared at the wound, and called the bleeding progress.

Think of where you were

when an islamophobe tore off her hijab on the bus,

and you did not do anything.

Think of the community centers that shook with death threats

and you

did not do anything

Think of the cops that gunned a black kid

into memory and you

did not

do

anything.

Step 4.

I will not come to you for help.

Take off the safety pin.

Know that fascism does not arrive with a name tag,it arrives as your friend.

It arrives as Richard Spencer, well-manicured and well-behaved, speaking poison into cameras spinning it acceptable.

Do not allow this by any means necessary

Leave your pretensions at home.

Practice

making

a fist.

Azura Tyabji is our February Poet in Residence.



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