This is the year that has tested us all.
This is the year that has broken our hearts.
This is the year our loved ones died for no ostensible reason.
God-damned virus, could have been stopped.
No one needs to breathe their last, left alone behind glass—
Tended to by a kind heart in a hazmat suit.
This is the year I can’t get home.
Travel ban, mandatory quarantines.
I will get there, anyway.
This is the year the doctor told me I could be next—
The nurse stuck a swab in my nose, scraped my brain clean.
Like inhaling chorine water in my uncle’s pool—
It burned for an hour after.
In my mind, I was a mermaid, bobbing below the surface,
Struggling for air.
This is the year I want to be over.
This is the year I look deep inside of me.
Turn the mirror on myself, and others.
Little white girl, what are you going to do?
Talk, write….do it.
Fight, talk, write, rail.
Don’t be mute.
This is the year that breaks my heart.
Yesterday, my friend’s kid was killed in downtown Minneapolis.
37th homicide in our city this year.
It’s only July.
My heart breaks—
For her, for all of you,
Denied of the basic right to breathe, to be.
This is the year I call out the old high school bully.
Talking trash on Facebook—
He says my Muslim congresswoman was in Al Queda.
Fake news.
This is the year I call out all the bullies,
The xenophobes, the transphobes, the homophobes.
Haters, take heed—
You know who you are.
You know, we are all basically haters, at heart,
Afraid of the other, the different, the unknown.
It’s scary, right?
People different than us.
To think we might have the capacity to hate.
We do.
What do we do with it?
At the end of the day,
Black, white, we are all racist.
We are all afraid of our differences,
Unfamiliar.
We keep each other at an arm’s length away.
What next?
We can stop this hate.
This year will be over soon.
We will stop.
Can we stop?
What comes of 2020 will be a bloom,
A resurrection.