seasonal solidarity // 8.2021
Written in 2021, this poem speculates on the surprisingly (?) quick appropriation of crip and neuroqueer virtual realities by capitalism at the onset of the pandemic, life one year later, and an enduring hope for joyous futures.
it was magic - (/s)
their sudden
“discovery” of
crip technology
crip time
and
crip feelings
how quickly
they shifted from
in-person to
pandemic profits
selling counterfeit
crip visitor passes
just
two
weeks
into the unexpected (???)
tourist season
apparently,
access needs
are in this season
[but only for
capitalist reasons]
so they mass
produced
our culture
“for only a
limited time!”
and now even
crip culture
is institutionalized
despite a
short tenure,
they managed
to transform
our world
into one we
could not enter
and they retrofitted
our ‘design flaws’
so we can’t
even dare to
coexist together
never mind
the fact that
we’ve been
here forever
----
so for a while
my residence
was a state
of preparation,
at home,
in isolation -
gearing up to
go to
what i call
“war”
and what others call
“back to normal”
and i gathered the tools
to patch the wounds
waiting in the wings
as the world changed
on the other side
of the screen
----
it has been
a year since
the people
with whom
i share
proximity
[i will not name it
a neighborhood,
but rather,
a network
forged by
forced intimacy]
first
‘visited’
disability and
neurodivergence
a fact
they seem to think
[if they think of it at all]
holds little importance
beyond serving
as a location
for monetization,
pathologization,
and “novelty”
and when
they finished
window shopping
at the gift shop
they left us here
holding the receipts
i have to admit,
they made good on
their promise -
they zoomed,
they conferenced;
they came,
they conquered -
and now all
that’s left is the
scorched earth
behind them
----
my neuroqueer
and crip kindred
and i have been
relocated to a
ghost town
next to the bustling
‘Eugenics County’ -
yeah, the one
with the towns
that have
ever-expanding
boundaries,
the one that
would rather
surveil us than
save us,
the one that
thinks by
tolerating our
existence they
are doing us the
world’s biggest
favor
our ghost town has
a population of N
to the power
of infinity
our world
may have been
powered down
but they cannot
control alt delete
our community
i just wish
i could say
the same about
the solidarity,
the intimacy
we’d thought
existed among
our friends and
families
----
and so now
we live in
a state of
liminality -
dialectically
in awe of
our infinite
wisdom and
collectively mourning
our new wounds
and evolving realities
———
i dream that
i reside in
a state of
crip joy
where i call
imagination
my home
and live in
a neighborhood
of interdependence
where people
are change agents
that drive vehicles
of transformation
with the windows down
to experience the
sensory euphoria
that is access intimacy
taking backroads
cocooned in
lush green canopies
leading to
beautiful, intersectional
disabled and neuroqueer
futures