listening party!

This Saturday the 11th, there will be a listening party for the release of the SPEAK! Radical Woman of Color Media Collective's spoken-word CD. The CD, a compilation of poetry, prose, story and song, is packed with the work of people you know, including Blackamazon, Brownfemipower, Cripchick, La Mamita Mala, Sylvia, me, and many more. We made this project with love and held hands and hard work, and we're proud to present it as a fundraiser to help get some radical mamis of color to the Allied Media Conference and support them in their activism.
At the listening party, you'll have a chance to come together and hear the album, discuss it, and take it home with you. We've put together a whole curriculum, written together, to help facilitate, and both I and Adele Nieves, producer and contributor, will be present to help get things shaking.



Excited yet? I know I am. Here's the details:
The It Is Better To SPEAK! listening party will be held Saturday, the 11th, at 7 to 9 pm at In Other Words Women's Books and Resources, 8 B NE Killingsworth St., Portland, OR, 97211. All are welcome. Bring a friend and spread the word! I'll see you there.

The press release for the album is below:
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*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:*
*March 9, 2009*
*SPEAK! WOMEN OF COLOR MEDIA COLLECTIVE** RELEASING SELF-TITLED DEBUT
CD*
*UNITED STATES **– March 9, 2009*– SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective, a netroots coalition of women of color bloggers and media-makers, is debuting March 7, 2009 with a performance art CD, accompanied by a collaborative zine and classroom curriculum for educators. Compiled and arranged by Liquid Words Productions, the spoken word CD weaves together the stories, poetry, music, and writings of women of color from across the United States. The 20 tracks, ranging from the explosive “Why Do You Speak?” to the reverent “For Those of Us,” grant a unique perspective into the minds of single mothers, arrested queer and trans activists, excited children, borderland dwellers, and exploring dreamers, among many others. “We want other women of color to know they are not alone in their experiences,” said writer and educator Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of the contributors to the CD. “We want them to know that this CD will give sound, voice and space to the often silenced struggles and dreams of women of color.” The Speak! collective received grant assistance from the Allied Media Conference coordinators to release a zine complementing the works featured on the CD, as well as a teaching curriculum for educators to incorporate its tracks into the classroom environment. “*Speak!* is a testament of struggle, hope, and love,” said blogger Lisa Factora-Borchers of A Woman’s Ecdysis. ”Many of the contributors are in the Radical Women of Color blogosphere and will be familiar names… I can guarantee you will have the same reaction as to when I heard them speak, I was mesmerized.” To promote the initiative, the Speak! collective is coordinating listening parties in communities across America, creating short YouTube promotions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7tsdaYmvhE) illustrating the CD creation process, and collaborating with organizers and activists online and offline. The CD is available for online ordering at http://speakmedia.wordpress.com on a sliding scale beginning at $12.

All inquiries for review copies should be directed to us at speakcd@gmail.com. Proceeds of this album will go toward funding for mothers and/or financially restricted activists attending the 11th Annual *Allied Media Conference* in Detroit, MI from July 16-19.
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no regrets no looking back and no goodbyes

I get so homesick.

I'm a country girl. We know this. And I ache sometimes for the hot breeze and tobacco-colored rimrock cliffs, sitting on my dusty car's hood looking up at a sky bigger than anything, somewhere on a potholed back road out at the edge of the big pines. For soaking in the river and baking on a boulder till dry, scrambling over the jumbled basalt with skinned elbows and a big pocketknife in sturdy jeans. For walking up logging roads and past split-rail ranch fences, sometimes with an eye to where I might park with a girl once the moon came up. I knew every flower by name, could tell you which bird just by its silhouette.

Back home, past the rusted-out stacks of the empty mill, you can see the Milky Way oozing glitter across the arch of everything. The train tracks go forever and so does the horizon, except where stretching calderas come up, a great cradling hand, to hold the boundaries of the knowable.

There's a soda fountain that makes its own chocolates and milkshakes, down there, and you can smell their caramel corn all the way down the street at the little restaurant we all went with our prom dates. Both of the old florists continued to not hire me every summer.

I don't get to go back. Maybe ever. I'm gone from there. I kicked the dust from my boots, packed everything in a station wagon, and ran. As far as most anyone knows, I might be dead.
And I might be, if I did go back. You never know. I did famously at cutting and running, and sometimes that cuts back.

The river cuts through everything there, and everything leads down to it. You just look for the green. We used to jump off a bridge in the summer , where two X's had been scratched into the rail to tell you where was deep enough, and crawl back up through the rocks and shady wild mint patches for another go. You just shucked your shoes and jeans and went, though I was always a big chicken about it.

Quaking aspen and knobby juniper tell you where you are, out there. We don't get those where I live now.

I say awful things about my hometown, bitter, narrow-eyed. Fair enough. It hurt me, bad. But some days, it's just to get away from loving it, from feeling rootless with my feet on all this cement, grasping at bluegrass music and "ain't" and typing inside to stay out of the weather.

I used to dangle my feet over a clifftop, rolled-up jacket for a pillow, and make sketches of every growing thing. I knew what time of year the dragonflies would have their highspeed aerial junctioned relations. Sitting up on my parents' roof in the snow, I'd watch the first melt sigh and plop off the branches. I'd shoo the deer from the summer garden, see if the coyote'd come by, and head down the road to town, singing.

They hurt me, and I ran, and I can never go back. But I can't honestly say there's nothing for me there.

I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There's a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There's opera. There's my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There's the woman I'm marrying.

But I've never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It's been years since I've pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.

Maybe I'm just not a teenager any more, and don't notice these things. Maybe, in a world that seems a little grimmer and more complicated, I've just let my sense of wonder slip, let the sky get a little less big. But maybe I'm just homesick for a home that didn't want me, an old lover that'll never take me back.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous. I've made a new home and a new life, with plenty of joy in it. The riotous wealth of subcultures and body-mods, the sidewalks that don't roll up at seven, the new places to go that don't run out, the people, all matter. I get giddy at the press and smells and close-in messy human wonderfulness at Pike Place Market, grin affectionately at the ornate Victorian houses Southeast Portland has long since rented out for duplexes to college kids and station-wagon dykes raising kids. I can rent Bollywood movies, for Gods' sakes. There's colors here I never knew existed, before. Besides, nobody pretends that my hometown is still what it used to be, anyway.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous, and I have the scars to prove it. Life goes on, often into something richer, fuller, more honest, more whole. But a leopard can't change her spots sometimes, and for everything that's changed, some things never do, and I can't shake the feeling, some days, that I'm in exile.



(This post had a soundtrack, on the train when I wrote it. It's Kim Richey's "A Place Called Home," for the record.)

I, colonist

I think, now that some dust is settling, one thing is clear: we all have a lot of slack to pick up. And I'm the slowest blogger alive, so I need to step up and get a little braver, a little more incisive, a little readier to ask hard questions, in order to help close the gap.

So here goes:

I am part of the problem of gentrification.
I live in an amazing neighborhood that I love. I moved here a few months ago to move in with my fiancée, and this was a place we could afford--we're neither of us rolling in excess money, as young dykes of color, me in blue-collar work, her in childcare--and it's beautiful, and the house was empty. But this is a historically black neighborhood, and there are no two ways about that. It is slowly being artsified, rents are going up, storefronts are fancier: it's now an "Arts District." Old barbershops and auto-repair places and corner mom-and-pop bodegas are getting pushed out by fashion boutiques, art galleries, and expensive restaurants every day. Houses are renovated as soon as they're vacated, and soon get filled with white folks and yuppies. Students and artists are moving in, and working-class black families are moving out, further toward the city's margins, further out from this influx of money and prestige. This neighborhood is known, too, for being home to a huge percentage of the city's queer women, but that demographic is shifting as well, toward more queer men, more young upper-class women moving in and replacing the blue-collar lesbians who used to rule the roost. More young couples like me and my best girl and our upstairs neighbors, fewer established families with kids who go to the public elementary school down the block.

I love it here, partially because of what it was and still mostly is--a decent family neighborhood with backyard gardens, cracked sidewalks, brick elementary schools and hole-in-the-wall taquerias, where I can walk down to the butcher's and they know me, where my partner and I can afford a home with a living room and flower beds. But I have to recognize that that's why a lot of other people moved here, too--and that by moving here, they--and I--are changing the place, house by house, block by block, into something else.

I had the privilege not to think about all that when I moved in. I just saw an affordable home near things I like, with a park close by and a grocery co-op and a backyard I get to play in--it's a little tiny house split in two, one couple upstairs, one couple downstairs. I saw a decent kitchen, and room for a couch for the first time in four years, and stability and security for me and my partner. I didn't have to think about what I represent to my holdout neighbors, what I represent to the black church across the street, what I'm a part of. I had the luxury of not thinking about myself in the context of greater currents of change--I just saw something that would be good for me.

And that matters. I get to have good things, of course. I'm under no obligation to flagellate for having taken the best chance I saw for a decent place to live that I love, and it could be argued that, being brown and queer and trans and likely to be restricted by my own oppressions in where I can live, I'm not so much part of the problem as part of the leading edge of the problem, and it's just that people like me are a foot in the door for others who come after. In the end, I'm not going to move out, after all, and even if I did, that wouldn't fix it or reverse what's happening to this neighborhood. And whatever protestations one might make toward my own marginalization, the fact remains: I'm brown, but I'm not the kind of brown this neighborhood has historically been home to. I do blue-collar work now, but I probably won't for life, and I have the privilege to expect that. I'm not supporting kids. I have an expensive education and I'm probably not settling here for good, which makes me part of that transient just-passing-through class of young people who are less likely to get to know their neighbors, to invest in the neighborhood's long-term future, to raise their kids here, to build lasting community.

My privilege here matters, and ignoring it is foolish and wrong. Whatever my intentions, and however powerless I may be to stop it, I am part of a wave of change that negatively affects working-class people of color.

So what can I do about it, now that I'm here? How can I divert the changing of the tide at least enough to offset my being here?
Well, for starters, it's not enough any more to "think globally, act locally." It's well and good to go there, and it's a start, but it matters that I support not just local business, but neighborhood business. That means buying my groceries at the mercado down the block and the co-op down the street, run by people who live and work here, with goods from close by, whenever possible, even if it means less variety or luxury, even if it means prioritizing supporting a working-class neighbor over getting organic produce that honors my other principles. It means getting to know my neighbors, and making an effort to build lasting community even if I'm not here to enjoy it ten years from now, helping reinforce this as a place where people know each other and help each other, not a place where some girl like me can just pass through without thinking of her impact on everyone else. It means lending a hand. It means indulging the old lady next door in conversation even when I'm on my way somewhere else, and recognizing that whatever she thinks of me, she is worth listening to. It means connecting to the outreach group for young women of color a few streets over, and asking them what I can do to help. It means sharing from my garden when it's harvest time.
It means making sure that I am not just using this place's resources and what so many people have worked so hard to carve out and build. It means giving back, and it means solidarity even when inconvenient, and it means being a part of a community, even when it's uncomfortable or it's extra work.

This neighborhood deserves at least that much, and much more. I'm not doing all of it, yet: there's my privilege again. The fact that I'm even discussing this reveals choices I have that not all my neighbors do. I could live elsewhere, probably. A lot of them can't, and most of their children won't be able to live here.

I wish there were a way to just stop it, but I imagine it's not for me to think up. It's for me to look up the people right here who're already working on the problem, and to come in humbly without expecting to ride to the rescue and ask, "What can I do to help your work?"

Here I am.

in making-up-for-the-weather news

Despite many efforts to block it, Oregon finally has domestic partnerships that are, in all but name, equivalent to marriage.

Here's the ruling.

We're got miles yet to go, but today, for just a moment, I'm going to sit and be proud to be an Oregonian. I was there cheering for the very first same-sex marriages in Oregon, and I was there for the heartbreak of having marriage equality shortly after taken away. The other night I saw a woman twice my age weep openly that this was even on the table and could be rallied for. And we did it.
We did it.


A contrite and deferent hat-tip to the ever-wise Sam at Xyre.

vigilance

So last night I ganged up with Katz of Athens Boys Choir and some amazing folks from Portland State University (I'm looking at you, Tash, Zena) and we had ourselves a Day of Remembrance. It was the first time in more than three years that I've read my work publicly, and I have to admit I shook like a leaf getting up to a microphone and reciting "The Seam of Skin and Scales." There were a few things I had in mind to maybe read for people, and the 'net was well represented; Tash Shatz read a piece from TransGriot before the reading of the names of the dead, and it sent a shiver through people. But I'm meandering.

I got up in front of the largest grouping of trans people, let alone their allies, I had ever seen. And I leaned out and made eye contact and I said it, all of it. "We are not mistakes." "No more being afraid." And whoever it shook out there, I think it shook me the most, after seventeen pages of the names of the murdered were read, in chronological sequence, and minutes in I would recognize a name, finally, and then realize it was someone who'd been killed when I was still in high school, and we had years yet to go in the chronicle of the brutalized and lost. No matter how many of us stood out there in the amphitheater, it was such a tiny, bright candle on such a cold night--this brief moment where we were, once in the year, literally shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering, some heads bowed, some held high.

I think it does something to people, to grow up transgendered in this world. It does something to grow up knowing you are considered expendable if not an abomination, that crimes committed against you don't matter, that laws aren't for you, that futures aren't. It does something knowing that in most places the best you can hope for is to be a punchline, and the worst a pulped, shattered, ragged statistic. It does something to grow up constantly having your perceptions of reality called delusional until the only way to survive is to convince yourself that you are indeed insane. It does something to go so far off the map, even leaving aside our own experiences, the batterings small and large, whether we have families who look out for us or families who cut us deeper than anyone, the endless funerals for people we'll never be.
I think it breaks most of us a little, knowing that sometimes the only time in a year we all get together is to read a thick stack of names of those of us who have been ground into the ground, punctured, stolen, crushed and rent apart, all in order to satisfy someone else's ideas of what the world ought to be--and to tell all the rest of us, look out. You could be next.

And yet we were shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering together, and raising our voices. And all of those people we were assured someone had tried to erase--because that's what so many of those murders were, efforts to erase the fact of a trans person from the world with the crudest and cruelest of instruments--rang out, remembered, even the ones called "unknown trans woman" and "unknown person" and "woman in man's clothing, name unknown." Real. Missed. And important.

No matter how many torches and pitchforks, there were were, refusing to forget. Refusing to allow that erasure. And that's what the day is about. It's about mourning those losses, and about telling all of those murderers and aiders and abettors that we are still here, we are not erased, and we will go arm-in-arm into the next day no matter the threats.

Many of us have lost someone in this struggle, whether they wanted to be part of the struggle or not. Many of us have lost parts of ourselves, and many of us have been hurt by people who wanted us on that list. But we endure, and we continue, and we light more candles, and we refuse to stop remembering, because it must be done.

At the end of the night, when we go our separate ways, we take each other home with us, every one--not alone, not over, not forgotten. We make it another day. It breaks all of us a little, living with the reality of the situation, but we keep it up, those of us who survive, and we live to keep a fire burning for those of us who don't.

Sacred dead, you are not forgotten. You matter. And we miss you.
We will carry this on for you. Let the weight pass from your shoulders to ours, for a while, and we will carry this struggle on for you until it doesn't need carrying any more.
Go, and rest. We will not forget.

de profundis

Four years ago, the political got very personal.

I was a good little radical then; that night, if anything, is what galvanized me. I had wandered down into the streets ready to spend a few hours protesting the oncoming war and then go home and on a date and to my homework. I can't really claim much in the way of nobility: I cared, I cared until my little heart was worn out, but I wasn't a grownup about these things, not yet. I still wanted Bad Guys to line up against. I still wanted to Win and Go Home, because I still thought there was a chance things worked that way.

So I wandered into the eye of the storm, and into a protest that shut down Portland highway by highway and bridge by bridge. The notion was to get everyone to stop and think: this is an inconvenience, but bombs are about to start dropping, tonight, on a nation of real people. Stop. Stop and look around. Feel this moment. Know that it matters. We knew everything would change, we knew it would be a disaster, no matter how much we could never have predicted about the four years to come.

I have written about this before: the peaceful protest I sat in, the places elsewhere in town where it got ugly, where demonstrators fought with riot police, where a police chief shipped in from LAPD and a mayor who wanted to make political examples got brutal and militaristic, where anarchists and would-be revolutionaries got stupid, or naive, or nasty. The squad car driven at me and my friends, engine gunning. The flashbang grenades thrown in our faces. The scared preteen who wanted to make a stand, choking on vinegar-soaked cloth in case of tear gas, that I helped smuggle out of the worst of it. The firehose, the rain, the choppers, the friends with black bruises a foot square that lasted weeks, the people dragged off of sidewalks and then arrested for jaywalking, the children called terrorists. The cops who told me, as they cuffed and searched me, that they'd like to torture me for opposing this President, that they wished they could treat me as Saddam would. The bones that stayed intact because of news cameras. The sadistic prison guards who forced me to watch footage, over and over again, of the first bombs dropping, complete with mocking commentary on how I hadn't been able to stop the deaths of my "little I-racky friends." I've written about the violences that gave me shaking, terrified flashbacks for months after, and I've exorcised those, mostly. I've told the funny bits, gestures wide, trying to make light of a night that changed who I was and my trust in the world forever, trying to make a good story out of the scared kid I was. I've tried the heroic angle, the confessional angle, the big-picture, the find-the-themes tale. I keep wanting this to be the opener for a piece about my discovery of street medicine and a new politics of triage, or part of a larger account of demonstrations, or about the conversation I had shortly afterward with a South African dissident that midwifed my perspective on matters of justice.

This should not be those, because I haven't exorcised the most selfish part of how I changed that night. Many, many people died that night, four years ago, far away from where I was. Many have, as a consequence, died since. Perspective tells me these things are the most important, that these things are, if I am decent and an activist and true to my faith, what I ought to write about, on this brutal, tragic anniversary of a war that never should have been.
My politics are concerned with those and daily, but four years ago, the political got personal. That's what I need to exorcise.

Feel this moment. Stop and look around. Somewhere, there's a bridge blockaded in my head. Somewhere, I'm still cuffed and working on an escape plan, but the daily routine gets hit, diverted, stymied, bottlenecked. Feel this moment.
I keep wanting to put it in continuity, in context, because that's what I do: stories. I keep wanting to move on down the road.
Feel this moment. Stop.

Okay:
I didn't go to jail that night at the protests for the war. Was I on the street to protest this invasion? Yes. Did I stay there because I felt that the law of morality and humanity came first, before my concern for the convenience of my neighbors, that this was a great enough wound in the world's order to merit disruption and risk-taking? Yes, of course, yes. Was I motivated by a dead grandfather whose world was turned upside-down by a US occupation that pulled out and left his homeland free of their prior oppressors, but still full of bloody, awful chaos, who I wanted to honor by trying to prevent any other children like him being forced into guerrilla war? Yes, yes, yes, peace be upon him. That was why I sat in the street. That was why I linked arms. But it was the arm-linking that made me stare down shotguns and sing at truncheons. It was the people I was with in the streets that night that made me bold enough to resist for more than eight straight hours in the cold rain, and it was eventually those same people who made me turn into another sort of activist entirely, the kind with a medical kit.
But it wasn't why I went to jail that night. I could have run away, even at the end, when we were surrounded by armored police and vehicles in phalanges two and three ranks deep. I like to think that I went behind bars for the cause, like Bonhoeffer and Berrigan and Esack and Tutu. Part of me did.

Let's get personal: I went to jail that night for a girl. Not one I particularly liked, while we're in the confessional.
One of the people at the core of the protest with me that night was a transgendered girl, a transient who was staying with some of my friends. She was deeply unbalanced, not a particularly healthy person to be around, but well-meaning. She had a lot of wild stories about a past escaping a cruel family, falling in with a cult, breaking free, moving on, finding herself on the streets, leaving behind a name she never told us. That night, over her more practical gear, under her satchel, she wore a tutu. She never did have much sense.
Let's confess: I was only a few steps out of the closet then, with anyone other than family and close friends. I had shoulder-length hair and looked fairly androgynous and didn't pass so very well even when I tried. That night, raw and haggard in a turtleneck and jeans, I looked male, and I had allowed that on purpose for protection, for privilege, to cover my ass. I still have survivor's guilt over it--but I'm getting ahead too far.

We were surrounded, two and three ranks deep, by masked men with covered names in black armor, with shotguns, with hands on canisters of pepper spray, with armored cars. I cannot tell you, if you have never looked on all borders of a space the size of a street intersection and seen this all around you, what it feels like. If you have not been there, I cannot really get across the feeling of looking at people next to you and trying to predict who will get hit first, who you might have to take a truncheon for, a bullet for, not knowing the intentions or the limits of whatever faces are behind all of that implacable, reflective plastic. I shed a lot of skin that night.

They announced, over a loudspeaker, the order to disperse. None of our guards moved; a small gap had been left on the southeast end of the box, as an escape route. The girl in the tutu got up, moved toward it, shrugged at the rest of us; it wasn't worth it to go behind bars, for her, I think. I was ready to get up and follow. She approached an officer, to ask him if that southeast gap was the way to exit, and could she disperse, as asked--I was near enough to overhear. He began to point, nod, confirm, when two more armored officers came up behind her, threw her to the ground, cut her satchel-strap and cuffed her. She was ground into the pavement as they hogtied her and carried her into a van belly-down.

I could not let her be the only one in there. Do you understand? We were the only two out trans women there, that night, in that place. She was not my friend, really, but I could not let her be the only one in there, alone. I linked arms and went nowhere; when they came for me, I stood up, I was polite, I announced the contents of my pockets and went civilly--but I went.
They split us up, as it turned out. I missed some parts that were related to me later. They put her in a cage--a cage!--first, apart from other people, poked at her, mocked her while she was under restraint. She was held out in the rain under a bridge, as I was, but for longer, and under a different bridge. Eventually, later that night, we were brought to the same precinct, where it got worse for both of us.

I keep wanting to move past the nausea and tell the bit about getting the other prisoners to sing "I Feel Pretty," the moment of queer solidarity I had in the holding cells, the way I small-town-charmed the detective who first processed me, before I was relocated. I want to tell the good bits. I want to keep my city lit up and lively.
Stop. Feel this moment.

She and I were processed one after the other. They read me as male; they read me as queer.
The sherriffs didn't stop at taking my shoelaces and my name. They cuffed me, surrounded me, and told me they would strip me down and lock me up with a rapist they had just arrested, who they described in graphic detail. They told me I would have no contact with a lawyer or the outside for at least three days, and that they could arrange this in the processing, that I would be alone in an isolated cell and they would ignore any cries for help. They told me in no uncertain terms that they would have me raped, even while I was cooperating, and they laughed. There were a lot of them, and I was alone, and they laughed. I was cold, and damp, and naive. I was very young. They did it because they could.

She was brought in after me, stripped down to her long underwear, and as they were throwing her to the ground and removing her piercings, she tried to bring up the local statutes preventing discrimination against the transgendered, the right to self-identification, hell, the right to remain silent. As they had told me, they told her these were "TV rights," and they knelt on her back and grabbed at her crotch and triumphantly announced that she was a he, and that he was a freak.

What did I think I was going to do, when I let myself be arrested? Did I think that I would be able to protect her? That my bearing witness would matter? There was that sharp, sick moment, where I tried to move, to intervene, to stop what was happening, as they dragged her in front of a medical examiner, harassed her, mocked her, shoved her around. There was that moment before I realized I was under lock and key, and being shouted at by armed people, and could do nothing to stop it. There was that moment where I contemplated the cowardice of not being beaten senseless and chose it.

There is a dull horror in watching and being able to do nothing. Maybe there's something I could have done, and I didn't. I don't know. I didn't. I froze and I choked on that feeling and did nothing. And I let it get selfish, because--
because--
It could have been me. Any other night, if I had worn a different shirt, if I had been further along, if I had--it could have been me, there. They threatened me; they carried out many of those threats on her, and I watched. I watched knowing that it very well could have been me, that for the rest of my life it could be, with no more option to hide things, soon enough. (I hear someone in my head, going, but there are laws. That kind of discrimination is illegal. Didn't you tell them?) I don't know what I thought I would accomplish, watching what they did to her, feeling it creep into me.

They locked her in a solitary cell and covered the window to isolate her completely. I was made to watch the foreign deaths that began that night on television, on repeat. Eight hours later, they let me out. Ten after that, they let her out.

There was supposed to be a suit against the bureau. She skipped town, moved on, scared, before her chance to testify. Records were, shockingly, lost, of who was on duty that night, of who was involved. The city moved on. The traffic was unblocked. Larger stories unfolded and the flurry of outrage was forgotten for a homeless, unbalanced young transsexual done wrong by people in uniform.

We never heard from her again. But let's be honest: this is a selfish exorcism. I don't know how she is, if she's even alive, but I know I'm stained, and that that night just won't wash out. No matter what stories, what themes, what global events were more important, no matter how many times I tell myself the context, no matter how many times I try to process it and get the traffic moving and get over the bridge we blocked together.

Stop.

It is spring, and the cherry blossoms are appearing, tree by tree.

Feel this moment.

on life shearing a little too close to the hadith

So last Saturday on patrol, we're posted up on a streetcorner because someone was throwing bottles at people, around one in the morning. I'm standing just outside a little alcove in the brick building my back is to, where two homeless people are wrapped in blankets trying to get to sleep. One of them pushes the blanket down, revealing that she is a tiny, wizened old woman, missing some teeth. Barely audible, she asks the guy across from me if she can have a smoke. He's not a smoker, and he looks at me; she turns and querulously asks me if I can give her a smoke, so I bend down, pull my pack of Parliaments from one of my pouches, open it, and hand her a couple of cigarettes. As she's asking if I could give her a light, my lighter drops from the cigarette pack, so I just pick it up and hand it to her. "Actually, just keep the lighter," I say; it seems absurd not to, and I'm more likely to be able to get another one than she is. She says thank you, for our being out here and looking out for her. I shake her hand, and then she looks at me in particular, and thanks me again. "Of course, ma'am," I say, "Any time." It was an odd thing to say: Any time you're going to sleep on the street and need a cigarette, I'll be there? But it popped out, and there it was.

She looks up at me, directly into my eyes, her own huge under wrinkled eyelids. Almost too quietly to hear, she says, "Any time you need my help, too."
All I could say, with a sort of thrum in my breast, was "Thank you." And then we had to move on.
When I came by there a little less than an hour later, my shift over, she and all her things were gone without a trace. The other guy sleeping there hadn't moved.
What I said out loud to my comrades walking with me was, "I hope she's okay."
In my head, I was thinking many other things.