Song








Two of my kids have been sexually assaulted. That I know of. Not like by strangers in a dark street, I mean like domestic abuse. Their "intimate partners", in each case their first, them still just teens. I don't remember my first assault, only the burning infection, the cold washcloth "down there", the searing relief of that cold. I was Glow's age.

Black men like my adopted boy K are dying at 7x the rate of any other group from covid. They are dying outside of prison and inside it at the same rate. Is that new(s)? I have known him since he was in 5th grade. He is so fucking sweet.

This pandemic changes everything but in some ways it changes nothing at all, it only makes visible what was already there. Healthcare workers are treated like chattle, it's a ticket to a middle class life at a high cost of debt and high risks of harm. Racial disparities, class disparities, structural disparities = death. The healthcare workers are not better off than their patients in most regards but they need to believe they are, duped into it, enlisted into playing their 'part of the problem'. The healthcare workers, their parents have the same diabetic toes breaking off in their shoes. It's no wonder they trend toward heartless over time.

And speaking of heartless, our minds, where the human heart abides, it gets the least relief. No cold wet wash clothes to ease the burning of the brain. Imagine this: all the people who for all these reasons and more have lived hurt before, parts of them on fire, their bodies violated, their babies hurt and abandoned by medicine or fathers or (for the particularly unlucky) abanonded by both. Imagine all that math of pain and resulting distrust. And now imagine: anyone who can go undiagnosed and survive WILL DO THAT. You will never know them. They'll just survive, carry the virus as a result, and kill you with it. You would too.

Are you listening? Is anyone?

I have 5 kids now total, just mine, no daddies alive or around, no other basement full of rice. 2 are victims, 1 is statistically doomed, the smallest has been on oxygen many times already. So if you see me trying to gasp for breath, it's because I feel like I MUST.