Journal

Psalm for the Slightly Tilted

This is not
a good year.
But it has
witnesses.

When you see them protest the powerful,
because who else
protests the powerful,
they stand
like flagpoles outside the courthouse
after the northeaster.

They came with
the wrong shoes
for revolution.
Still,
they showed up.

They come in clothes
that gave up first
beneath
the clouds
torn as boiled hospital sheets

Comfort, Lord,
their bodies—
each a question mark
doing time
as a coat rack,
hung with borrowed jackets.

They are your legion
of bent spoons.
They are the only ones
who showed up—
with their orthopedic flair.

They cant off-rhythm
and mean it.
These are my kind of people:
no tears—just
steam from a kettle
that never quite boils.

In times like these don't forget us:
the lopsided leaning
on one another like paperbacks.

Comfort us standing—
half scarecrow
half saxophone
with a squawk.
Comfort us sitting—
which we do
like furniture
of the modestly ambitious.

In the year they come for us
watch my people
make protest signs
out of old pizza boxes.

Watch—there are no boring people
which is unfortunate.
You'd think statistically
we'd get at least a few—
one-speed souls
with just meh stuff to do.
But none of them
are dull.
Each
carries
a suitcase
held together
by scotch tape.

Comfort them standing up—
where stiffness
becomes state policy.
Their bodies,
folded umbrellas.
Comfort them sitting—
in that collapse
called calm.

These are your coffee stained saints
who rise not with trumpets
but with Advil.
They stand
and wait
creased like maps
of a country
that doesn't exist anymore.

— Ilya Kaminsky
posted with permission 2025-07-03

Descendants of Black Folks Who Don't Have Last Names

Without the recipe of colonization,
there would be no birth of this nation.
No gunpowder, no graveyards on stolen ground—
no America.
Without tribal blood,
without kidnapped gods—
there. would. be. no. America.

You preach "land of the free"
but bind wrists, break backs,
quiet lynchings, hollow screams—
contradiction is your constitution.

You protect animals from cruelty,
then legalize bull bucking
as cowboy culture.
Call genocide a jersey.

You mount foreign founding fathers
on land they stole in armed robbery,
spill blood and name it Thanksgiving,
promise clean water—
but Flint still drinks lies from plastic bottles.

You say "equal opportunity."
We say: Equal for who?
It's only fair when the skin is fair.

Only justice when the judge shares your genes.

Plant drugs in our halls,
guns in the gutter,
poison pipelines so branches never root.

You turn classrooms into cemeteries,
blackboards wet with chalk and blood dreams.
Every backpack—
a body bag
waiting to zip shut.

Beneath your red, white, and blue,
Black lives suffocate under white lies.
We are the legacy you can't unwrite,
history that sits in your mouth
with teeth too Black to extract.

Dralandra Larkins
2025-07-02

What is Democracy?

Most of us know that democracy means to be able to follow our stars—beliefs, career, even one's fashion sense—as our guide. To me there is another important aspect of democracy that is often overlooked: community. Democracy fails if we are not willing to work in concert with one another. Law-making and law-abiding require a communal effort in a democracy. And being a member of a democratic state means being willing to go along and get along. One word for this is compromise; a better word is cooperation. I often feel the rugged, solitary individualist side is over emphasized, and the cooperative side gets lost and even denigrated, called socialist and worse. This is ridiculous. Communal cooperation is as American as baseball, jazz and the great American musical.

Mari Wittenbreer
2025-06-28

June 14, 2025 — No Kings

I head to the protest,
My friend calls
she breaks the news
Legislators shot in their homes

She pleads with me to be safe
In this country where
Things are already fraught
Where some worship guns and a mad man leads

I cannot control for safety
I can set my heart and mind on courage
I call my husband, he does not answer
I leave him an "if I die" voicemail

I'm handed a badge and a yellow fluorescent vest
I close the white Velcro tabs
I slip the lanyard over my head
The identification on the card reads MARSHAL

I think of John Lewis
As he put on his beige trench coat
As he packed his small knapsack
with a sandwich and an apple

I am practiced at chanting and singing
This is a new role
The main instructions
Have your head on a swivel, look out not in

We learn two people have died
The killer has not been found

People thank me
I thank them
We exchange knowing glances
an arm squeeze, some tears

There is a moment of silence

For those injured and those slain
There are call and response songs
Words of poetry and resolve
Handmade posters held high

My head on a swivel
I see five young men
In red caps, one with a bullhorn
Stirring for likes on TikTok videos

We of the yellow vests make a circle
Our backs to the ones in red we face out
We talk to the protesters, encourage them
move on do not engage

Most follow our instructions
I can tell it is hard for some
The words from the encircled are vile
Filled with lies – I will not repeat them here

I want to ask them if their parents
know they are here
I want to tell them they are welcome to join us
when they realize the faux king has no clothes

This is not my job today
Not while I have on the yellow vest
So, I look out
And encourage others to walk away

After, we gather in the tunnel under the capitol steps
We take off our vests
We lift our MARSHAL tags over our heads
We debrief. Feel relief

I meet up with my husband
We hold tight
We head to a nearby pub
with people we love

At a crosswalk, a woman we don't know
Says I'm so overwhelmed, I can't stop crying
She explains she has been living in a deep red area
Today she saw the world she wants

In the dark paneled upstairs room of the pub
People hold up their protest signs as they leave
No longer in my yellow vest I pound the table
And chant NO KINGS! NO KINGS

The room erupts with me

Diane Brady-Leighton
2025-06-28

In Memoriam for a Strong DFLer

There's a photograph going around of Melissa and Mark Hortman from the DFL Humphrey-Mondale Dinner last Friday night. It's likely the last photograph of the two of them together. They are frozen in that moment, smiling. His collar is open; her jacket is buttoned. I'm somewhere in the blurry background; My wife and I also attended the dinner. We never met the Hortmans but our lives often crossed each other, as Minnesota lives do. My wife worked at a Brooklyn Park pediatric clinic near their house. And I'm sure I saw Hortman at my favorite annual place to visit: the frenetic Minnesota State Fair DFL booth.

There's another way I feel like I know Melissa Hortman. In my small town in deep-red Douglas County, I'm sometimes introduced to someone by being told, "That's a strong DFLer." We understand how those words mean something about values and how we live them. Melissa Hortman was a strong DFLer. When Governor Tim Walz ran for vice-president and spoke of legislation in Minnesota that improved the lives of children and families in Minnesota, he was talking about work he'd been doing alongside Hortman.

After this painful weekend, we'll get back to work in our local DFL. There's a table at the Pride festival to staff. A booth at our county fair to set up. It's in a dark hallway in the back of the grandstand, where discussions about reproductive freedom can get drowned out by stock car races. We also need to find candidates to take on Republican incumbents, no matter the odds. Someone who can face a campaign the way Melissa Hortman did, over and over.

On Saturday at our local "No Kings" rally, I saw a family with three children, walking back to their car. The youngest was still carrying a protest sign. It stopped me. More than anything else, it seemed to sum up this weekend and what we now face.

"I deserve better," it read.

We all do.

Michael Tisserand
2025-06-14

Standing on the delicate edge...democracy

The great composition
The reflections and the differences
The vantage point of bloom and fade
The history of that pull away from the jingo
The thunder of the other kind of colonization
This land, this land
This land is your land
Not this land is all mine
The beautiful fragile thing
The far-reaching antidote to kings
Not just palimpsest
Not just parchment and inkwells
A promise
Not moral surrender or theory
Vision, the constant equation
Of we, we, all of us
In full detail of our becoming
Of our multitudes, our applause
for deep understanding
Of the historic
The cured, the mended
Of the human state of impulse
That creates grace
Of memory, to remember
Everyone, those lost, those fallen
The great experiment witnessed
Not to be drop kicked
Not in need of mouth to mouth
Not a murder victim
This is always a becoming
Not just an abstract
An oasis of purpose
A swearing in of hope
Non-fiction and poetry
Open doors
A complete picture
A shimmering
The listening and the telling
The language of the whole
Including shame, the stain, the grief
The wildfire, the hunger
But never a final elegy

Diane Jarvenpa
2025-06-10

What Democracy Means To Me

Democracy is messy. By nature, it is tension. And arguing. I miss when politicians were proud of bipartisan triumphs. I don't believe it was ever easy, but it was necessary. Maybe painful at times: to have to listen, reach across the aisle, consider another's perspective and offer concessions; resulting in the slightest move of the needle—where an individual may come away dismayed at the process because they didn't get their way, yet instead—something greater was achieved. Maybe our people grew tired of compromise. But compromise is what sets our country apart. A healthy Democracy is tedious, exhausting, it involves rhetoric and challenges, debate and returning to the wheel. Democracy is loud. It allows for a multitude of voices to rise. It's a cacophony of differences. Where somehow, we all move forward together, sometimes in the slightest way. We should never want Democracy to be unilateral, or easy. It shouldn't represent one party, the president or one region. By nature it is for all the people, by the people, and the people need to lead the country again, with politicians returning to their roles as civil servants of the people.

Cole W. Williams
2025-06-10

Quotes

We have a list of quotes from writers and activists.