11 Poems for Care

We're fighting for health care and we know you are too! Poetry, in fact, is relevant everywhere, including policy debates. As the administration and majority party seek to reverse the progress made, and to remove the protections given Americans by “Obamacare,” Split This Rock offers 11 poems on matters related to health and health care.

When we searched our collection for poems that witness on health or illness, to respond to the current fiasco of dismantling the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we found most of the poems on this theme are by women. Fitting, since the current Senate bill never once mentions women. The poems range in subject from families living with a son’s mental illness, to the way chronic pain can govern a life, to how our veterans need the care our government might soon eliminate - unless we fight!

We hope you will find inspiration for your advocacy work as you resist the draconian and mean-spirited reforms currently under consideration. You might not only read these poems, but use them:

●      to help keep yourself grounded

●     to open meetings

●     to share among discussion groups, inspire others

●     to email to representatives to inspire them to keep working for the health and safety of the people

●     or to email to those who need a reminder of just how much our health is a matter of luck, or class, or gender, or war.

We offer excerpts of these poems, below, for your hearts and your courage. Click on the title to read the full poem.

For more poems related to matters of health, its economics, and the effects of care, please visit  The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.  

As I Pay Forty Dollars

By Susan Eisenberg

for my asthma inhaler that

last year cost fifteen

I pause     for the mom

whose young son will forget

his inhaler / on the bus /

at his friend’s house /

in the park / at the game /

maybe in his school locker /

somewhere-I-dunno;

Test for Cognitive Function

By Hermine Pinson

Mother

Slipper

July

“I will ask you to recall these words

at the end of our session”

Depression Insists We Stay In

By Katy Richey

You do look fat in those pants,

probably gained twenty pounds
in the last thirty minutes. There’s no parking
within ten blocks of the party.
All the people you hate are already there.
They’re miserable too, but tonight
you won’t be able to tell. They’ll have
green string tied around their middle fingers
and you’re supposed to know why.

A Car, A Man, A Maraca

By Charlie Bondhus

At the mirror I heft

elbows, belly, cock,

say hematocrit—44.3; hemoglobin—15.2;

neutrophils—62; monocytes—5.

And Still They Come (for Dr. Sue)

By Gordon Cash

… You make war
On us, ignore or call collateral
The pain and blood of woman-damage left
In all your battles' wakes.  And still they come.
The patients come, each seeking her own peace.

Rosary for my Brace

By Sheila Black

The brace was metal, and it fastened around the ankles.

Outside in the street there was the beggar with elephantiasis; there was

the leper, the neighbor with eyes milky blind,

and in the book the child with the hand reaching out for the water.

Everyone spoke in code, everyone lied. There were the

invisible hospitals. There were the poor who could be scattered

like lice.

Dick Cheney’s New Heart Speaks

By Melissa Tuckey

A roadside bomb is planted in every chest

I was a pea sized fist in the dirt of a man

who had half your brains

but he was good

The Therapist Says to Talk Through the Door In Case You're Listening

By Elizabeth Acevedo

 … Rob, I am splintered, drawn blood.

We both know how to slip medicine into milk, how to gift

each other with our backs. The hundred kinds of get out

someone can backhand against a name, take them all, palmed,

opened, don't be afraid that I'll ever try to walk through this door,

because the surface against my cheek is the only comfort you've shown

me in years.

Oceanside, CA

By Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Balancing on crutches in the shallows

near her mother, a girl missing her right lower leg

swings her body and falls, laughing.

    

Ode to the Chronically Ill Body

By Camisha Jones

This body       is lightning

     Strikes the same place      more than twice

This body       is a fist                         pounding its own hand

This body       crumples like paper

           I crumple     like paper           because of this body

This body       just wants        and wants         and wants

from Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography

By Jennifer Bartlett

based on a series of neat errors

          falling and catching

to thrust forward

sometimes the body misses

then collapses

sometimes

it shatters

with this particular knowledge

a movement spastic

                       and unwieldy

is its own lyric

The Quarry's 10 Most Viewed Poems of 2016

As The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database turns two years old, we’re thrilled to reflect on trends related to The Quarry’s use and share the top 10 poems most viewed in 2016. From its inception until December 31, 2016, The Quarry was viewed 106, 607 times. That’s over 3 times as many visits as reported last year in August. 

We hear of the poems being used by teachers in classrooms, for writing workshops, in vigils, performances, worship services, and more! The poems are traveling the country and the world with their witness and their provocation, their mourning, their love. 

We look forward to creatively expanding The Quarry’s reach even further, so it continues to function not only as a repository of excellent poetry, but as an active tool for those who seek to make justice present in our time. Towards that end, we’d love to hear ways you’ve used it – for organizing, teaching, worship, reflection. Email your story to info@splitthisrock.org.

We offer you the 10 poems in The Quarry most viewed in 2016, as inspiration to fuel further action. We celebrate the fact that all ten poems are by poets of color, as is the most viewed poem in The Quarry from its inception in June, 2015 to December 31, 2016: Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact.”

You’ll see some familiar titles on this year’s list if you compare it with one we posted in 2016. In honor of The Quarry turning one, we posted a list last year of the poems most often viewed in its first year, which spanned two years. This year’s list offers a spotlight for poems most viewed and published in 2016. We'll be tracking numbers by calendar year from now on.

About the Most Viewed Poems of 2016

The poems readers turned to most often in 2016 were poems that addressed the dangers our communities face with tremendous compassion, with tenderness, with fierce insistence on staying alive. In 2016, you visited these poems in The Quarry 10,678 times!

The 2016 list tells us readers have been thinking about the complex ways our genders are perceived, how our sexualities are too often policed, about the longing and anger inspired by America’s demands for assimilation, the ways that white supremacists impose and do violence. But these poems all share another theme: they testify to the resilience and resistance of our communities, to their generous and unrelenting imagination. 

Through the top 10 poems and the readers who have given them their care and attention, we know that the trouble roving the land now is not new, is not unique, is not even terribly original in its dreams and tactics. Even its courage, its aggression is not new. It is the same trouble that social justice work has always challenged and imagined a way beyond. 

But, many people in this country find themselves newly attuned to this old, destructive trouble. It is not only these newly "woke" citizens who feel the pressure, the weird loneliness of living in this trouble and finding the courage to act for the good. 

Hannah Arendt taught us that the one greatest tool of totalitarian regimes is isolation and its effect is loneliness. Even in this totally connected age, it's possible to feel (again, and again) abandoned, cornered, isolated. Poetry and poets have long sung to us the truth, and the truth told with clarity dispels that loneliness in each stanza.

The most-viewed poems of 2016 serve as a cure for that oppressive loneliness. Those who hope for our surrender will find, as we do in each of these poems, that they are wrong. We are powerful, and courageous, and we see each other.

Let us revel in these 10 most viewed poems of 2016 from The Quarry (beginning with the most viewed poem of 2016):

1. How To Enjoy Your Vacation To A Country That Says It Won The War by Gowri Koneswaran
2. I Don't Know Any Longer Why the Flags Are At Half-Staff by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
3. america by Fatimah Asghar
4. Your Rapist is on Paid Administrative Leave by Tafisha A. Edwards
5. The Transkid Explains Gentrification, Explains Themselves by Taylor Johnson
6. There Is a Lake Here by Clint Smith
7. origin stories (reprise) by Safia Elhillo
8. The Hour Dylann Roof Sat In The Church by Denice Frohman
9. #flyingwhileblack by Imani Cezanne
10. Too Pretty by Sunu P. Chandy

* * * * * *

M. F. Simone Roberts is the Poetry & Social Justice Fellow for Split This Rock where she co-curates and manages The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. Roberts is an independent scholar of poetics and feminist phenomenology, a poet, editor, and activist. She is co-editor of the anthology Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays and author of the critical monograph A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray's Ethics and Post-Symbolist  Poetics. Her poems are coming soon to a journal near you. Descendant of both aristocrats and serfs, she adventures this world with her consort, Adam Silverman.

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Ten Ways to Support Split This Rock

Split This Rock has been a people's movement since its founding in 2008. Sustained by the community's call for a permanent home for progressive poetry, together we have engaged poetry as an agent of change, speaking up for peace, elevating the voices of the disenfranchised, and using poetry to call forth the just community we wish to see. 

June Jordan's words ring true when reflecting on Split This Rock's history and accomplishments: we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

As we head towards the end of Split This Rock's fiscal year, in a society fraught with turmoil and with the future of arts funding uncertain, the need for continued solidarity is crucial. 

Our goal is to raise $5,000 by June 30 and with your help -- financial and otherwise -- we know this goal is in reach. We're halfway there! If you believe in the work of this organization, there are so many ways to show your support and help equip us to enter our next fiscal year, marking Split This Rock's 10th anniversary, strong. We offer 10 suggestions below. 

* * * * *

1. Repost, Share, Shout Us Out! Moved by a Poem of the Week? Share it on your social media and encourage people to sign up to receive our emails. Excited about the DC Youth Slam Team? Invite friends to attend its next event. Love the new Split This Rock merchandise? Point people to the website. Let others know what moves you about Split This Rock and that the organization is worth their time and investment.

2. Attend David v. Goliath on Tuesday, June 27, 9-11 am at Busboys and Poets - Brookland! Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team goes up against the adults of the Beltway Poetry Slam team in a fundraiser to send both teams to their national slams. It’s a night of fun competition you won’t want to miss! Tickets are on sale for $10 at Eventbrite.

3. Hire Poets! Split This Rock’s Ushindi Performance Tribe, composed of dynamic DC Youth Slam Team alumni, is available for performances, workshops, and other engagements. We promise they’ll blow you away! Just ask the folks at the opening of The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Kennedy Center, Poetry Out Loud national finals, and all the other places they’ve shared their talents. For details, send an email to slam@splitthisrock.org  

4. Host a Fundraising Event and/or Donate Signed Copies of Your Book! Help us widen the Split This Rock network by hosting a house party, reading, or other fundraising event. You supply space and refreshments and invite your friends. We'll provide poetry and info about Split This Rock. If you’re a poet, send us a signed copy of your book (or a few!) to sell at one of these special events or to offer as a perk for fundraising campaigns.

5. Connect Split This Rock Poets & Poetry to Activist Circles! Encourage activist friends and groups to incorporate poetry of provocation and witness into their work for social change. Let them know about The Quarry online social justice poetry database and Split This Rock as a resource.

6. Get Creative with Your Giving! Gayle Brandeis donated $5 for every pre-order she received for her latest chapbook. Be like Gayle and get out of the box! What can you do to encourage others to give? What other resources or talents could you contribute? Visit the wish list on Split This Rock's website to see if it sparks an idea.

7. Give the Gift of SkyMiles! Help us send youth to Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival and bring featured poets to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 and other events.

8. Help Secure Venues for Split This Rock Poetry Festival and other events! DC venues are costly and hard to find. But poetry deserves beautiful spaces! Help us find donated or discounted venues. Festival sponsorship opportunities are also now available. Visit Split This Rock's website for details.

9. Volunteer! It’s festival planning season! And 2018 will be full of 10th Anniversary activities! Though Split This Rock's reach has expanded dramatically over the last ten years, we remain a small organization internally and simply could not pull off the festival and other major events without a strong crew of volunteers. Check out the festival leadership roles on the website! Volunteer positions are always available!

10. Donate! Your donations send the DC Youth Slam Team to Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam 2017 in California, support 2018 festival costs such venue rental, event mobile app fees, featured poet stipends, and the like, bolster efforts to make Split This Rock programming accessible to all, and so much more! Visit Split This Rock's website to read further about what your gift can do or to give online!

And there are so many other ways to help! Reach out to us if you'd like to assist in any of these ways or explore other options at 202-787-5210 or info@splitthisrock.org. We'd love to hear from you!

2017 Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism Celebration Honors Recipient Christopher Soto (aka Loma)

On Friday, April 21 at the Arts Club of Washington, Split This Rock presented the 2017 Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, sponsored by the CrossCurrents Foundation, to Christopher Soto, aka Loma. The ceremony, cosponsored by the Arts Club of Washington, the Institute for Policy Studies, and Busboys and Poets, was an inspiring celebration that packed the house. 

Judged this year by Holly Bass, Dawn Lundy Martin, and 2015 Freedom Plow Award Recipient Mark Nowak, the 2017 award went to Christopher Soto, who was selected for his advocacy on behalf of undocumented writers and queer homeless youth and for supporting queer poets of color. Christopher offered an acceptance speech by video, as he had a prior commitment in Boulder, CO, meeting with the leaders of the Undocupoets Campaign, one of the initiatives for which he was selected. 

The three award finalists, Francisco Aragón, Andrea Assaf, and JP Howard, were also celebrated and each delivered memorable and poignant words as part of the award program, including poems!

The finalists are: 

Francisco Aragón for supporting and promoting Latinx poetry and poets:

Andrea Assaf for telling stories of the Arab-American experience and of US service members and Iraqis in the Iraq war:

 

and JP Howard aka Juliet P. Howard for building community among queer poets of color:

 

Additionally, the program included a welcome from Arts Club of Washington President Judith Nordin, opening remarks from Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning, and words from CrossCurrents Foundation Chair Ken Grossinger. 

Jay Chavez, a member of Split This Rock’s Youth Programs, courageously helped open the event with a breathtaking poem about their mother’s experience immigrating to the United States. 

Visit YouTube to watch videos of the entire program. And check out photos from the event, all by Chelsea Iorlano, on Flickr.

Prior to presenting the award to Christopher Soto, Holly Bass delivered the following judges' statement:   
 

In his bio, Christopher Soto (aka Loma) describes himself as a “queer Latin@  punk poet and prison abolitionist.” Loma’s proclaimed identities challenge us to think about the seemingly incompatible inhabiting one body and working from that one body to write searing, critical poems that alter the impact of lived reality. 

In the prose poem, “Rework,” Loma writes:

[…]There was a manner by which the oppression was normalized; by which the feeling of liberation was long forgotten; by which everything revolved around capital. But you could no longer afford to stay in your father’s home. There was no rent control and some nights you thought that he would kill you in your sleep. Language is where the tongue fails itself over and over again[…]

This excerpt is much more than a traumatic personal narrative. The oppositional nature of things is laid bare: “oppression”/ “normal”; “oppression”/ “liberation”; “capital”/ “liberation”; “rent control”/ “capital”; “no rent control”/ “death.” Loma calls our attention to the impossibility of existence with the experience of trauma, and yet one survives. There is also an insistence on the failure of language in the face of these layers of lived experience. The poem is riddled with layers in which the incompatible happens simultaneously. And, how do we speak these things, the poem seems to ask, what words can struggle an approximation?

Christopher Soto’s multifarious work bridges the gap between literary activism and organizing, as the very poetry he writes is often investigative of the cultural and structural barriers of toxic masculinity, misogyny, heterosexism, racism, and xenophobic nationalism. In his literary activist work, Loma creates spaces for the intersection of identities to be expressive—such as in Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, where Loma is editor. He is also a co-founder of the Undocupoets Campaign whose mission is to “promote the work of undocumented poets and raise consciousness about the structural barriers that are faced in the literary community [and to support] all poets, regardless of immigration status.”

We exist, as poets, in an era of egregious politics, an era where #MuslimBan and #BuildAWall flash across our iPhones built in China by other poets like Xu Lizhi, the 24^-year-old migrant factory worker who committed suicide by jumping out of a residential dormitory owned by his employer, Foxconn. Social media allows us to be anywhere at anytime, to trace social upheavals by hashtags, to be there from our living rooms.

The poet, the poem, the iPhone, the world… We’re all articulated within the “invisible-visibleness” of a Global north perpetually attempting to dominate the Global south. It’s a poetics (and an economics) of consumerism, migrant labor, and the deep loss of empathy and agency. And it’s a poetic response to these arenas that we find in Loma’s own poetry, dragging out the underbellies we refuse to look at unless we’re forced to look.

Of the many deeply engaged poets who were nominated for the Freedom Plow Award, we have chosen Christopher Soto as this year’s winner. It was far from an easy decision. What is happening in the United States at this moment has re-energized a bounty of magnificent projects to address the almost daily injustices that flash across lighted screens. The assaults upon the environment, our bodies, who we choose to love and how we choose to live and where we choose to sell our labor power. These and so many more areas of our lives are seemingly under attack at the present moment. And we were deeply heartened by the many, many poets currently working against these assaults.

One of these poets, Christopher Soto, inspires us with the depth and variety of his engagements. In addition to his work with the Undocupoets Campaign, he has helped to establish Amazon Literary Partnership grants for undocumented writers. These fearless and necessary contributions, defiant in the face of Trump-era hatred and bigotry, make Loma a model Freedom Plow citizen. We are pleased to grant him this award on behalf of Split This Rock.

The ceremony concluded with these moving words from Christopher Soto:

We are grateful to the Arts Club of Washington for hosting the awards celebration again this year. Our thanks especially go out to Sandra Beasley, Judith Nordin, and Yann Henrotte for their help and hospitality. We extend our deep appreciation as well to all the Freedom Plow sponsors, Upshur Street Books and Anna Thorn as the event book seller, ASL interpreter Billy Sanders, Skies The Limit Entertainment for videotaping the ceremony, Grace Toulotte of United by Love Design, and all of the Split This Rock interns and staff.

We look forward to honoring the innovative work of activist poets again in 2019!