just before Rafah
Saturday night sitting on a cliff
over the Schuykill, dark water, a corporate tower
flashing 52 DEGREES, HAPPY BLACK HISTORY MONTH
and then the stock market ticker, a backed up highway:
I wonder is it the superbowl or are we finally being bombed
and everyone knows but us and is fleeing.
There is no place to flee. I am here for the duration
I say heart is heavy, angel of death all around
no wonder so many hearts just stopped this week
I don’t always care to talk about it but sometimes
I need to spend my tiny free time staring at dark water.
I can’t believe they don’t lock up this river
you say the good thing about Philly is that it doesn’t have enough money
to lock everything away
Always the refuge of abandoned, one tiny silver.
Heart heavy, dark water full of mystery only thing that holds.
Dark water from my eyes, only a trickle.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a nonbinary femme disabled writer/ poet disability and transformative justice movement worker and renowned hot freak bitch forever 38 looking baby illder of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is DIsabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building The Stacey Park MIlbern Liberation Arts Residency, as far as they know the only writers residency by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. Follow them at brownstargirl.org and llps.substack.com. Raised in Worcester, MA, they currently live in Lenapehoking/ Philly.