I drive through a thousand pine shadows on my hourlong commute through southern Maryland. Their souls cast shift with each second, covering the entire road over time. The shape of existence is fleeting, and none of our human bodies last as long the pines that have rooted on this coast and given us air to breathe. I’m not sure why people spend their mortality trying to remove others from a place none of us own, no matter the temporary legal or scriptural writs say. Time, money, emotions—spent into exhaustion and a sense of nothingness.
I write to remind my soul.
I write to reshape my soul into presence.
Existence is political. Consciousness is political.
I work as an educator to feed my family, including my students, because I know enough about language and how it is perceived by audiences, and how to sit with it and build something meaningful out of it, but I write to feed myself.
One good meal, one good poem, is never enough, not in a world in which we have to keep fighting to remember our humanity—to care about the sanctity of a life.