"A beloved poet said to me recently, that "we are surviving empire." I don't know if I am, surviving, but I get up every day as an act of refusal, a way to decide who I will be and how I will live. Poetry allows me to translate myself despite the decaying conditions we are subjected to. When I am asked what I was doing while these nations died out slowly, I will say I was uninterested in craft but invested in commitment, in mobilization, in the aliveness of others. As a poet thinking about place, I have been unable to move these past months. Not from Al-Shifa Hospital, not from Darfur, not from the images, the screams, the distortions, or the destruction of homelands. Place is both a present and future existence, one that we must fight for."

https://scalawagmagazine.org/2024/09/love-letter-from-a-poet-under-empire/ #resistr