What Is to Be Done

What Is to Be Done

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When asked Why here?
Mao said We didn’t pick it

Here is a slab of If
Here is a set of appropriate roles; armed in cinema

Armed against No one was here
I see you, us. Someday
Our arthropod utterance

Intention alone is not dialectical
or petroleum or vaccine patents

Is it too late for analysis?

What filled me with the limbs of little girls, plumes
of suicide, what fed my grandparents rotting vegetables
rationed in the camp of illegal flowers

Unrepentant, sunlight can lay
eggs like a spider mother, a season before death

Love has ruined my life
Love made useful by class—
remnants of murdered trees, imaginary debts

Translated into adhesive, anemone venom
green slippers at the portal of beetles

I have come to terms with failure
as a contrabass in the spine,
implacable echo of goddamn

I still love the people
more

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Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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