FOR THE SURVIVORS
I am with you in Rockland
and in Red Hook.
In your Rhode Island
culdesacs. I am with you,
racing home from the school
bus-stop to the above-average
norms of home-cooked meals
and moms that never die. I am
with you when they do.
I am with you in Harlem
and in Detroit, in Oakland,
Compton, D.C., Atlanta, Yonkers.
I am with you in the ghettos
and the grottos, the revolver
and the revolution.
I am with you,
looking in from the outside,
silenced.I am with you
in your anger, bubbling.
Milk on a forgotten flame,
flame in a forgotten forrest.
I am with you in Dublin,
in Sicily, in Warsaw, in Tel-Aviv.
I am with you in your fast-food
American drive-thru at Taco Bell,
longing for Oaxaca and the shores
of La Mansanilla. I am with you
in Cancun. Like a cancer.
I am with you in the heat of it,
freezing for lack of familiarity,
faking a forced hybridization.
I am with you at the Epson Derby,
and in the crowd at Woodstock.
In the fixed silence at the dinner
table when you announce
that you’re a lesbian, a feminist,
not going to college. I am with you
at the clinic, in the classroom,
at the Kappa-Beta-Delta induction
ceremony, in the voting booth.
I am with you
when your body begins to dry up
from the inside out and you begin
to wonder if you will ever learn to love
those thick thighs, those saline scars,
that hijab-hair. I am
with you in the ancestral blood
and the unacknowledged shame.
I am with you in Kabul, Afganistan
and Birmingham, Alabama.
In war and in sex. In birthdays
and break-ups. In debt and in love.
I am with you in the chaos
and the wake of it. In this life.
In the Death to come.
In the eternity that binds it all
together. In the atom. In the
Big Bang. In the beginning.
In the Alpha and the Omega.
In the poem and the apocalypse.
I am with you.
I am with you.
I am with you.
When it all ends,
I will
still
be
with
you.
- Karolina Manko - astronautssleepinspace.tumblr.com
‘This is the piece that I read at Housing Works bookstore. It was well-received and it was an honor to read with Philip Levine and Tracy K. Smith. ’
