Last Acts

please put in the book the way it’d expand in our cells to grieve her in smithereens make us bigger and contracting and honored and guilted Chelle says now seventy-something L’s thinking through what her last action will be right before she dies, when some blood count is perilously low or high and sight is starting to go but vision intact and mark in hand wikipedia tells me everyone thought the cpusa’s alignment with a self-determined nation in the black belt was a joke, or rather the idea itself, that no one with half a political consciousness desired it and wiki tells me L thinks the bombmaking after the Haymarket riots was a sign of her crew being “out of touch” with time how I always think of her as touching time and how she will continue to do so long after she dies I suppose it’s no surprise the people’s encyclopedia remains rooted in a state archive or a statist publicness, that you can quote someone verbatim and enter into the record a whole- hearted lie, can foist upon history a promise to protect the hundred shattered windows in the vicinity poetry is an archive, the poem is an archive, I never forget it when I write