litany with June Jordan

Editor’s note: Poet Rebecca Salazar shared this poem at a vigil for Renee Good on Saturday, January 10 at Fredericton City Hall. 

litany with June Jordan

you give me cause to ask if I’ll survive you, but

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

I know I can’t survive without your anger.

mine’s burnt out from every time you sighed

over the latest murdered brown kid, so sad, 

then went back to brunch, forgetting us.

my anger burnt out on the private violence

that whiteness does to you when it parades you

as its token. my anger burnt out when each public harm

done to me was a gamble: skin tone? queerness?

gender? disability? or some new secret reason 

that attracts white violence to me?

my anger died when the good white author’s son

joked “here comes ICE” while standing next to me

and I’m still not sure if he meant it for me 

or forgot that I was there to overhear it, but my anger

died when all the good white people laughed.

 

my anger died when 

Emmett Till / Philando / Trayvon / Michael / Breonna / 

Chantal / Regis / Marie Ange / Isidro / Abelardo / 

Fouad / Kai / Francisco / Nenko / Santos / 

Hind / Mohammed / Anas / Keith Porter /

and more names than my hands can write 

were killed, and yet, were not enough to stir you 

out of comfort long enough to come, 

collect your racist relatives, 

before they end another one of mine.

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

but you were quiet while I lost my voice

in grieving all those lost, all those erased,

their names run through my hands like water.

there is a loneliness in being the one brown friend

so many of you have, and even though

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

and meant it, you’ve never recognized your face,

your family, your kin in videos of bombings all your life.

you’ve never heard an echo of your tia’s voice in that 

of the young journalist who tallies ceasefire violations

on her phone. you’ve never seen your father’s brothers multiplied

to thousands, all these uncles crammed in cages, labelled terrorists,

all for the crime of having names like yours. and yet,

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

and some of you tended my grief enough to call it

what it’s always been. I’ve heard you, too, you’ve said

I LOVE YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

and I believe you when you say it now, again.

there’s still a loneliness to hearing as you mispronounce

the Latinx names each Trans Day of Remembrance,

even as we both grieve how many there are.

it helps a little when we sit together and I help your tongue

make holy all the contours of the next year’s names.

in that small harmony, we both can give their memories

more honour than we each could do alone.

 

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

and this felt hopeful until last week, when the pedophiles

bombed Venezuela, then threatened my homeland next door,

and half a dozen other countries with the same theft, and

my body felt the coming death of generations, past and future,

those I’m tied to, and the ones I never will be after this.

I can feel how many of my people have been, will be yet erased

by yet another genocide, another oil war, and that loneliness

is vast. this week, when the latest person killed on camera

by the fascists wore a face like yours, 

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

because I know that feeling in my bones, and maybe now

you feel how close this violence can cut us all.

she was a queer woman, a mother, and a poet.

she was not the first queer woman, mother, or poet

murdered by the state, but the ones who lived and died 

before her had names that your father can’t pronounce,

or won’t pronounce, so there’s your good white people

yet again proclaiming terra nullius, proclaiming someday,

we can vote our way to freedom on this stolen land,

so long as we sit quiet enough to live that long.

 

I was not the first poet to write it, when 10 years ago

I wrote: white folks keep saying genocide Is too heavy a word 

when they’re not burning with its weight, and now,

a decade later, do you yet feel its shadow on your shoulders?

I’ve said for 10 years how I wish that poem wasn’t relevant

and how I want it to mean nothing, someday, and I say again

I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

I wanted I wanted I want a Free Free Palestine

a free Sudan / free Congo / free Tigray / free Haiti / 

free the land my people come from, free this land back

to the peoples your ancestors stole it from, and

free the ones whose struggle I don’t know yet,

and the ones whose struggle isn’t mine, because it’s theirs, 

and none of us are free until we all are, and 

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

taking away the futures we will never get to know.

 

when i wrote 10 years ago I don’t want children

and my family is worried I will change my mind 

when I grow old leaving no future generations,

but I’m worried that I won’t survive, myself,

I meant it, and I almost didn’t get this far,

so more many more times than you know, even the times

when your voice or your laughter pulled me back

to build a future for the generations that we owe,

even without the debt of DNA or parentage,

and it’s a future I am more certain each day

I will not live to see, and still, I build it with you,

since the future ones will need it.

 

once, I wrote that when my cousins choose

to birth new generations, they do not do so

to feed children to cages, 

our futurity is not a crime

futurity is not a crime

futurity is not a crime

and 10 years later now, the cages multiply

and take new shapes and disappear us faster,

and I feel my own future is less a promise, 

more a scarcity these days, and so

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

and I can’t stop it on my own. so promise me, 

my good white friends, my mixed race kin, 

my chosen family and bond, promise me

that if I’m ever the next poet killed in struggle

and someone hosts a vigil like this night’s,

that no one reads my poems aloud 

who hasn’t lived them.

 

promise me you’ll listen as the voices of my kin

sing with the voices of the poets of resistance

killed before me and those after, let us sing

the way Refaat, Solmaz, Mosab, Renee and June sang that

I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP

and let our voices and our actions stop all genocides

and let us make the justice we have longed for,

both the living and the dead, with our own hands.

promise my cousins and my cousins’ children 

and their cousins’ future children

and their future cousins’ children 

there will be a future they survive in,

even and especially if you or I 

don’t live to see it—only, let us live

just long enough to build it.

 

Rebecca Salazar is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer based on unceded Wolastoq territory.