Inordinary Times

 Ordinary Times

We know.
Not because anyone told us.
Not because a messenger came.
Not because the ending was written, or sealed inside a holy decree.

But because we have endured empire
Long enough to know the shape of its shadow.
The order. The surveillance. The appetite

We know what happens;
Not always under the same accusation,
But always public,
Punitive, a spectacle, sinking us ,
Into compliance.

We call this
The last ordinary Saturday,
But normal was taken from us long ago.

Before the watching.
Before the measuring.
This is just another day under empire

And still

We gather
We keep our hands busy.
As if tending could stall the sentence.
As if devotion could dull command.
As if care could reach the body,
Before empire does.

We register the heaviness already on our shoulders,
The weight already pressing into our bodies,
The way we look at each other
Like we are memorizing our faces, and

We know because we have always had to know

What it is to be watched

To be weighed

To be found wanting

We are the bodies searched first

And believed last, and

If no one is coming to save us,

Then no one is coming to stop us.

We know when a threshold opens
We know when a gathering becomes a risk

And still, we reach

Toward a body we know will not be protected
Toward skin already claimed by surveillance
Already marked by accusation

We sit closer than is safe
We let our grief come early
We let it settle into our bodies
Into our breath and bones

This is the goodbye before the goodbye
The one we have been whispering
Since the moment we understood that
This is how empire teaches fear
How it turns bodies into warnings

And still

We lean toward each other
We learn a language of shoulders and palms
The soft weight of a hand saying

You are here. 

You are here. 

You are still here

And still
Before the body is broken into evidence

We touch what is living
We tend what is trembling

We refuse

To let empire know what we know

(This piece was delivered on 3.28.26)