Thoughts on mercy, humanity, vulnerability, and beauty
When I realized
I wanted an oxford comma pressed between my thighs
and I made it a joke to tell you
You knew how completely serious I was
and still played the bit
There exists a neighboring universe
where I learned that from you
instead of a book
I was never a boy,
but I think you could have made me a man.
The guys who say they want someone with a sense of humor
Just mean they want someone to laugh at their jokes
Not a comedian in her own right
But you do both
You laugh at me and with me
And I want all of it
Smiles playing on my skin
Laughter effervescent in the air.
You tell the best stories.
And I know it’s because if you are already laughing,
No one can hurt you with their jeers.
You tell us all that you can taste our voices
Like it’s a party trick
and not an invitation into bed
laying next you
hands in your hair
mouth at your ear
whispering
tell me what my voice tastes like.
I know what it sounds like
when lightning strikes mere yards away,
the way my hair rises
and my skin prickles
and my body crouches before
I know why
I know the explosion of fireworks
the sound of rockets
ushering in a light display,
and we’re on the precipice of safety
I know the eruption of emotion
when Mom was fed up,
the stream of fury that rolled out of her,
sitting heavy around us, mustard gas,
freezing me in my tracks, choking
My anger is not a punishment,
Zeus can rain down his lightning,
mythos of an angry god.
I am no god, no saint,
my anger as willful as any storm,
the outcome of weather patterns.
(CW: police violence)
This morning, I saw a man get tased.
I saw a Black man get tased.
I saw a Black man wearing red get tased.
I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department.
I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police department for shoplifting groceries.
I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department for shoplifting groceries during a global pandemic.
I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department for shoplifting groceries during a global pandemic, during which the government has only provided $1,200 in 6 months.
I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department for shoplifting groceries during a global pandemic, during which the government has only provided $1,200 in 6 months, which amounts to less than $7 per day.
This happened next door to my 3-month-old son’s daycare.
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I am one block away, I see a Black man get up from sitting on the curb, surrounded by police. He pulls away. I hear a pop. He crumples. Then 5 or 6 officers are on him, cuffing him. Kneeling and pressing on limbs, putting him on a gurney, strapping him down, pressing his head down. I don’t hear him make a sound. I see the wires from the taser. I know the pop was too quiet to be a gunshot, but the visual is jarringly similar.
I only film a minute of it, after the tasing, after he is already on the gurney. Because I don’t press record correctly in my hurry to get my phone out.
I hold my son in my arms while I film. I say we live in a police state to him. I say we need other people, not police to respond when someone is having a mental health crisis. When someone is unarmed and has committed a nonviolent crime. When someone is trying to feed themselves.
I count the squad cars. It takes me too long, because I am shaking. I stop at 5. Pause. There are 6.
They put him in an ambulance. I stop filming. I put my son in his stroller. He cries. I say, now we will pray. I wish I knew the man’s name. I walk to the grocery store.
The employees are talking about the man. He pretends to be crazy they say, to get away with it. He got tased they say in grimly satisfied tones. The white store managers had been standing at the end of the block where he got tased. When I leave the store, they are standing by the entrance, talking to another white store manager.
No one making decisions about any of this is Black. This man probably had white teachers in school. And now, when he’s trying to figure out how to feed himself, it’s white store managers and white cops. And his community can’t build social, political, or economic power, such that, when he’s out of food, someone sees him and sees his humanity, and says, what do you need to be able to eat with dignity?
I find somewhere to sit and nurse my son before daycare, across from an apartment building. Several tenants go in and out while he eats. They are all Black. Why aren’t the store managers Black? Do they live within a block of the store? A mile? Two miles? I don’t think so.
My son is done eating. I walk us back to the daycare. All the squad cars are gone. On the stoop, there are two packages of fish from the grocery store. They tased a man and didn’t return the stolen goods to the store. They left them to spoil in the sun.
In this police state, nobody wins.
I drop my son off at daycare. I walk home. I see the man wearing red seize and crumple over and over in my mind. I cry. Seize. Crumple. Cry. Seize. Crumple. Cry.
My rage starts to boil. We’re lucky it’s only protests and looting.
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A few weeks ago, my city council member, Lisa Goodman, sent out a newsletter saying that people feel unsafe downtown, condemning the looting that occurred after a man’s public suicide was mistaken for another police killing, and not condemning the MPD for eroding trust to the point that it was reasonable to believe they had shot and killed another Black man.
The only violence I saw today was perpetrated by the police. One of the only times I feel unsafe downtown is when I see the police interacting with citizens. I don’t like all my neighbors. Some of them are rude and stinky and sexist. Some of them walk three-wide on the sidewalk and don’t make room for anyone else. It’s annoying, but not unsafe.
Cars that don’t yield for pedestrians are unsafe. Cyclists and scooterists who use the sidewalk are unsafe. Police are unsafe.
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A friend encouraged me to write down how I imagine this should have gone differently. So here are my what ifs:
What if the store manager had a conversation with the man and said, ”I know it’s tough. I know you need food. How can I help you get the food you need and not steal it?”
What if the city had unarmed civil servants and social workers who could be called, instead of armed police, who would connect this man with services to get his needs met?
What if the store managers were Black and lived in the community, so that they recognized that they were investing in the whole community, not just paying customers?
What if food was a public good and decommodified?
What if this was a production of Les Miserables? What if this man was Jean Valjean?
What if society took its metaphorical and physical boot off of the necks of Black people?
This is a poem I wrote for my wedding and hid in plain sight. When an unsuspecting guest picked it up, she was instructed to stop everything to read it, which she did. My husband had not read the poem yet, and it was a joy to watch his face as he took it in for the first time.
I wrote this for my wedding, but it applies to this moment of turmoil and uncertainty, and I hope you enjoy it and take courage.
For the One Who is Brave
(a comprehensive exposition of what bravery is)
The first time you are brave,
you probably won’t know it
until it is too late
and your only choice is to keep being brave
or lose—maybe everything.
Later you will learn to know in advance,
so you can opt out early
and not be confronted with the concept of brave to begin with,
Because you will also learn in exactly which ways it is hard
to be brave.
You will know it is lonely, solitary, and scary,
It is lights and eyes pointed at you,
It is interrupting a wedding.
You will know the difference between brave
and the comfort of your bed, a dark room,
and an “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
But what’s important, once you have learned the difference—
when being brave is love taking a risk,
not lightning taking the shortest route to the ground—
is to do it anyway,
to say yes to living,
yes to trusting your gut,
yes to distrusting your depression,
yes to going on a first date,
when you thought first dates were done.
It is naked, standing three feet apart,
and holding off on the impulse to dim the lights,
or move together to touch, instead of
look—holding each other’s gaze,
for seconds then minutes.
It is sharing the parts of you that you’d rather
weren’t there, that you wished were better,
but aren’t yet.
It is “I was wrong” and “I’m sorry.”
Sometimes, even, it’s fighting monsters,
casual and grandiose.
But it is mostly glamorless,
mostly the hard stuff,
mostly the what’s next stuff,
but we still write songs about it,
and read poems under the glare of stage lights,
and perform plays,
and go to movies about all of this
ordinary bravery.
And this is no different,
Except that this is for us,
for future yeses,
for we do,
we will,
we can,
we must,
yes,
yes.
I was hoping this post would be about my unopposed triumph at housing court last week, but court isn’t about winning. As one friend put it, court reliably makes everyone a little happy and a little disappointed.
Why did I got to court?
I was trying to get out of my lease, because my next door neighbor is an AirBnB with a revolving door of late-night parties on the weekends. My building management virtually refused to get involved. I contested that this is a breech of my lease, which has an implied covenant of habitability and quiet enjoyment. In other words, loud parties have kept me from using my apartment as intended (for sleep), so I told my landlords (via the court) they were in breech of the terms of my lease.
After 6 months of this absolute circus, relief is on its way. I will be living elsewhere by March 14th.
Basically, this involved sending a letter citing the specific law I thought they were breaking at least 14 days before rent was due. Then, when property management failed to respond in any way to the letter, I filed an affidavit and paid my rent to the court instead of to my building. It cost $70 to file. My court date was set when I filed for just 2 weeks later.
I represented myself. Lawyers are expensive, and most people file pro se (without a lawyer) for this type of case. I gathered every piece of documentation I could think of from floor plans to emails to phone records. I even included an ultrasound of my unborn child and doctor’s notes from Kevin’s sleep doctor. It was a lot of work, but I knew I needed all of it to make my case.
I wore my most fitted dress, to show off my six-month pregnant belly. I didn’t have to fake my waddle, and I brought a pillow to sit on.
I got nervous. I reviewed my material and talked over every possible angle we’d need to anticipate from the apartment’s lawyers.
Then, it turned out that before appearing before the judge, I’d have to sit down and negotiate with the apartment’s lawyer. If we couldn’t reach a settlement after that, I would present all my documentation and the court referee would decide if it merited a trial. This being my first time in court, I didn’t know that at all and had come prepared to present an argument to a judge.
The negotiation took place in a little room with me, the lawyer, the property manager, and Kevin. The lawyer and I did 99% of the talking. Kevin graciously carried my things. The lawyer started by saying there’s no way a noise complaint case would win in a trial and that the tenant legal hotline (Home Line) we used should stop telling tenants to file Rent Escrow over noise problems. This was gratuitous, and he shouldn’t have said that, knowing I didn’t have counsel. Further, he was lying, but I’ll get to that later. Next, he hammered at my request of 2 months rent abatement. According him, there was no way the property company would agree to return 2 months worth of rent to us. When I held my ground and asked why the property manager’s written promises for fines and eviction had gone nowhere, we moved on to the actual offer.
The offer: Get out of of the lease at no cost. Pay rent for the remaining time we live there with a move out date of March 31.
Everything prior to this offer was intended to make me feel uncertain about my course of action and grateful for the offer once it came. Moving out was always going to be more important than getting money. The lawyer knew that. Also, moving out was the most likely outcome if we had gone to trial. The money was always a long shot. I knew that.
At this point, Kevin and I spoke privately, decided to take the rent abatement off the table for a move out date of March 1. I knew they’d say no, so I was prepared to accept March 14, the date I requested in the affidavit.
After this, the lawyer and property manger spoke privately. When they came back, they agreed to a March 14 move out date. We filled out some paperwork, submitted it to the court clerk, and waited for our case to be called again.
When it was called, the lawyer and I stood before the judge, who read our settlement agreement, made sure those terms were what both parties agreed to, and dismissed us. I waited in the lobby until the court order was printed. The lawyer went to deal with his other cases that day.
Back to the lawyer lies: Minnesota courts have ruled in favor of tenants regarding noise disturbances. Those cases had documented complaints with failed intervention on the part of the landlord, usually over a the course of many months. While our case didn’t meet every detail of the cases I read about, it fit a lot of them. The main difference was the amount of time a tenant went before filing rent escrow. I couldn’t afford to wait longer as a pregnant person, and I couldn’t deal directly with the problem tenant. Plus courts generally don’t really like AirBnB. All this is to say that trial would have been a bit of a gamble, but probably not to the degree that the lawyer wanted me to think it was.
Additionally, Home Line’s advice to file Rent Escrow was extremely effective insofar as, prior to filing, my landlords were offering terrible solutions that would have required us to downsize while expecting a baby or pay them more money to fix a problem they created. Once I filed, we got what we wanted. They had to pay an expensive lawyer. We had to pay $70. At the end of the day, we are only paying for half a month more in rent than we had originally planned when we started negotiating in January. But the property company paid a lawyer more than we pay in half a month’s rent. They also have to list the apartment, show it, and they still have a disruptive AirBnB to deal with, regardless of who is in our unit.
Maybe there aren’t winners in court, but this time there was definitely a loser, and it wasn’t me.
If you care about tenants rights and access to safe, habitable housing for all, please consider donating to Home Line. Most of the tenants taking on their landlords were dealing with unattended repairs. Home Line operates in Minnesota to help these folks who have fewer resources and worse living conditions.
If you are a tenant with a problem landlord, call Home Line. It is free.
This is a list of Kevin/Heaven puns. This list is neither exhaustive, nor does it reflect the personality, desires, or sensibilities of all Kevins, namely, my Kevin. It has been a delight to other Kevins and friends to Kevins, so much so, that I hope to one day develop a line of men’s dress shirts with these phrases embroidered on their pockets. In the meantime, enjoy.
I like your body;
it’s a good body,
you said as if in defiance of
years of bad theology too apt to cling
to my skin, acting as filter through which
I made too many decisions,
telling girls too young to know
how to put on a bra or wear a tampon
that they are never subjects, only objects,
so stay atop the tree, and never let yourself become low-hanging fruit.
These conversations turned the air stale
until the implication had insinuated itself into every hallway
and after-church donut:
If you have a body, maybe God doesn’t want you.
Don’t like your body;
it’s a bad body.
And knowing what a lie it is
doesn’t matter as much
as hearing the truth,
the liberating syllables,
of seeing creation
and saying, it is good.
One memory of my childhood that has resurfaced as I reacquaint myself with Minnesota winters is of a bin full of winter wears. This contained any winter accessory you could desire–scarves, mittens, hats, gloves, neck warmers, even thick socks. When it was time to bundle up for a romp in the snow, we raided the bin. It was in this way that a single glove whose partner had long since disappeared could linger in our home for years, at the bottom of the bin, only to be used in desperation, when there were no matching gloves that fit. It was a way of holding onto memories, in a way. Plunge your hands into the bottom of the bin and pull out the gloves you wore when someone ran into a fence with the toboggan and split his lip, or the hat from the winter your neighbor plowed the entire neighborhood and dumped all the extra snow in massive piles in the empty lot.
I have been amassing winter clothes. It is cold as tits here–a bad simile, but fun to say. It snowed hard in October and then it felt like a complete month where the temperature never broke 30, and dipped into the low teens. And I know it gets even worse in January. My nose has been mildly bleeding for 6 weeks, because it’s so dry; and my phone battery is shot, because it was not designed for use in these temperatures.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a coat and snow pants for skiing. Also, so I can once again rollick in the snow. I finally have proper winter boots. I had been muddling through with thick socks–which is a pretty good way to do it.
I have to think about ice almost every time I set foot outside. I have not fallen yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Right now, I have no organizing principle around my growing pile of heavy scarves, hats, and gloves, so they are just kind of overflowing in the front closet or the desk chair, where I plop things I don’t have a plan for.
I don’t like holding on to things. I have few tchotchkes. My best possessions are my clothes, books, and, more recently, my sewing machines. Those are what I care about, and those are what take up the most space.
I need a bin though. A tub where all things winter can live for easy access in the cold months, that can be tidily put away when it warms up again. I need a spot where partnerless gloves can cling to me for too many years, and remind me of yesteryear, of the cold, of the magical, confounded snow.
An Indomitable Grace 