asa king
a letter to diane
revolution moves like water leaking out of a jail cell toilet,
slow and fast all at once each individual droplet assembling,
fixing itself to a greater accumulation of parts meanwhile
i am still thinking about points of contact, how the rain fell
while we linked arms, held on, touched one another
with hands on shoulders and backs tenderness and fervor
i will stand with you forever, for as long as it takes
today i woke up safe
i’m thinking about how sgt. rice
pulled down my mask to take a picture of my face
while i stood ziptied in the park
i’m thinking about how our photographs
are pinned to a wall in some precinct in manhattan,
how they call us terrorists
how they call rittenhouse a patriot
i’m thinking about how they single us out,
hunt us down,
come to our homes,
pull us from our beds
i’m thinking about how they’d rather see us dead than free,
how they can’t imagine
what freedom might feel like,
how they have the audacity to believe
anything they will do to us
even death
could ever make us stop
antigone ii
i position myself with great precarity
at the mouth of disaster your theban daughter
as yet unrepentant,
having survived those things which
i assumed would simply kill me
in another life i might emerge from the grave of darkness unchanged
in this life i bring it with me, blood beneath my fingernails, dirt in my mouth,
my wounds still red as roses
blooming below the gallows
i owe you only and exactly
the loyalty love demands of me
nothing more
nothing less
asa king is an unapologetic antifascist currently writing and doing harm-reduction outreach in brooklyn. their work is drawn primarily from the tactile and sensorial details of moments they hope to transmute from experience to language. they are deeply in love with the world. their poem “another conversation about ghosts” was published in volume 12 of Spit Poet Zine.