The New York Quarterly in 2022.
I wrote this poem in response to a prompt given by poet Carolyn Forche in a Lighthouse Writers workshop focused on the poetry of witness.
To wander East Colfax Avenue in the 1970s is to be young, female, angry and ripe, a June tomato planted early, reddens on the vine, splits open and bleeds. It runs down your leg and stains the street. You don’t stop, you don’t wipe, you let it remain, to remind us of the disappeared women, to remember Joan Little, the inmate who refused the guard in the prison kitchen with an ice pick. You stop to look in a storefront window between Race Street and Vine. It is Woman-to-Woman Bookstore, where more ideas are born on the stuffed sofa in the basement than there are books on the shelves. Sniff the fresh carpentry, leave late after Saba’s Judo class, stop by the Satire Lounge, sit on the kitchen side, where Flacco smothers burritos with sour cream and green chile and Linda serves it up. Watch out, the plate is hot. This is a time that exists in our mouths, the melting cheese of desire and the hot peppers of language. You are licking your fingers, young and inky. You are fired up Hey, hey ho ho, patriarchy has got to go. You are hawking our monthly newspaper at 9 th & Corona, Big Mama Rag, pages and pages of women on the rag, on the rage, on the Rag Mama Rag, her words, her glory and her size, the fact that she is alive and sells for twenty-five cents. An underground newspaper, literally, she has arisen from a basement on Gaylord Street. Once the FBI paid an informant to burgle that office, trash files, pour glue in your Smith Corona. It put Big Mama on the front page and our bad-ass Pat Schroeder pushed Congress to investigate. Now, forget Gaylord Street, and join the tour, take a right on Colfax with hundreds of others to Take Back the Night. Pass the porn parlor and the strip joints. After all, it is U.S. 40 in the city, and hey, there’s Sid King himself, egging on the hecklers, as a pack of dykes steps up to face them off—lavender tee shirts, tiny tits, tight jeans, uh uh uh uh uh. On your right, the immaculate Cathedral, as expected, turns its back on us as we march by, However you dress, wherever you go,yes means yes and no means no. But it needn’t have bothered, as each cross street disappears as we pass by on Colfax. We lead an invisible parade of passion and principles that marches still. Something that is a permanent marker on the asphalt, embossed on the avenue itself. It stains your fingertips after you read it, you can’t get it off you, why would you want to, why even try?