by KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI
“A simple phone booth sign reminds us that racial segregation and discrimination were very real here in Nebraska. Our history includes laws against interracial marriage, practices that segregated home buying, and a once-active and virulent Ku Klux Klan. Even during World War II the Nebraska USO clubs that served our brave service men and women had separate facilities for black and white soldiers.” TEXT/PHOTO/Nebraska State Historical Society
at night, i’ve been having trouble sleeping
scrolling through my social media feeds
learning things that don’t mean anything to me
what is the worth of a word?
the measure of its value?
at the gathering of Occupy Wall Street activists
I said maybe my movement was the protests
against the War in Iraq
we flooded the lanes of Lake Shore Drive
twenty thousand strong in 2003
ash and the eery silences of
lower manhattan on my mind
cops on horses
a dozen rows deep in riot gear
our poetry set no longer exists
i stare forever
at the Starbucks where the afrocentric bookstore used to be,
the sports bar where the hip hop club used to be
I stare forever
trying to wring out in afterimage
heads bent in towards after-set street corner ciphers
beneath lamplight, hazy and low
i never did fall out of love with all of us
those same lightpoles today strapped
with street-level security cameras
sometimes i wonder if the internet was made
to destroy us, what were all we all doing
before we became star reviewers on yelp
or anonymous trolls on youtube or
keepers of thousands of selfies, outfits of the day,
food porn, managers of pinterest boards,
senders of sext messages, videos and memes
my gmail told me once that i had checked it up
until that point 44,000 times
i click, like i blink
i click, like i swallow
i click, like i breathe
is it inevitable that activists become capitalists?
that capitalists become supercapitalists?
a friend pointed out
that it was the hippies
that turned into the boomers
that turned into Wall Street
that turned into mortgage deregulation
that turned into economic crisis
we shall overcome some day?
there are no “whites only” signs anymore
there don’t need to be
written deep into our psyches
there is nothing ambiguous about
being unwanted in a space
it is abundantly clear
no signage necessary
at the Assata event, she held a thick paperback
in her lap, dog-earred and thumbed through
she looked at me and said, “you remind me
of my old activist girlfriends from Chinatown
back in the day.”
this aging Black Panther running fingers along the
bent spine of a bound version of the Cointelpro papers
“all that time we were working,” she said,
we didn’t know about any of this.”
bullet holes still fresh in the body
if not martin luther king jr.,
then tens of thousands, nameless
the stain on the balcony of the lorraine motel
there is legacy and there is grief
we cannot meet the man
because we have already met his martyr
decades of trauma to decay dreaming
the free body is not the free mind
the free mind is not gained by others’ permission
what do i reach for when i reach to -click
what do i reach for when i reach to -click
what do i reach for when i reach to -click
i want to know your dream
tell me do you have a dream for that one day?
Kelly Tsai’s blog is Yellow Gurl and can be reached at Kelly_Zen_Yie_Tsai@mail.vresp.com