As we are mere days away from another leap year, I thought I would re-post a poem of mine that reflects on our last leap year. Perhaps the world’s most infamous. Thanks for reading.

Before 2020 even arrived
I claimed for all to hear that it was going to be an auspicious year
One for the books
This is my modern habit
Claim it and it becomes truth
Or as the proponents of this idea say
It’s already truth and just awaiting your agreement
Clever that one
Whenever I am at the end of my tether
I cling to clever mystical ideas
One-One-Twenty-Twenty
A milestone birthday
I had just turned the same age as the year I was born
and a leap year to boot
A virtual bonanza of numerological magic

too luscious not to play with
Life has felt stifled for so long that
I’ve taken to making ridiculous claims
Not even certain I believe
but more than willing to be loud
A coming move
A new town
Resuscitation
Breathing room to be artful
to recover health and spirit
Say it loud and the world is yours
An unapologetic child’s belief in magic
where not much else matters
but my own contentment

And then an entire planet folded in on itself

A dying star in the midst of my own brilliantly sketched intersection of stars
I found myself positing with spit that the only use for a Klan hood
was to operate as a medical mask
A snark not nearly so absurdly cutting once I read of
a man in San Diego who did just that
For years I felt alien to my own race
A terrible affliction
Suddenly I was thrusting fist into air and shouting about Black Lives
Couldn’t NOT see my siblings’ necks under that knee
blood seeping from tear ducts like plastic Jesus tchotchkes
On the corner for $1.89 but you can always bargain
The threat of extinction nearer than the sun bleeding through
raggy human-stained ozone threads
When the phalanx of law enforcement swarmed protestors
and I watched from the anxiety-disordered safety of my flat screen
and was more fixated on who was social distancing and masking up
than on the power of protest
my brain seized the way a computer freezes and needs a moment to untangle
When death came and came and kept on coming
A party crasher who WOULD NOT LEAVE
Breaking the furniture and pissing on the carpets
When the pulverized bones of Black Lives, Asian Lives, Trans Lives
by lynch mobs and those enlisted To Protect and To Serve
When the pulverized lungs of those who did not survive ventilators
were blown by a restless wind
and the powder gusted and gathered
as airborne as this virus
dusting like topsoil the heads of a system committed to its status quo
because we led  (as we always seem to)  with privilege and hubris
and a baffling new war was declared: “to mask or not to mask”
a ghost town was erected in the place where
equitable society tried in futility to exist

And as pandemic-age babies were born
from mothers who risked safety to be in hospitals
and fathers not even allowed in delivery rooms
As they came into this life    into this collective terror of a country
that went and made itself pariah to the rest of the world
these babies were anointed with the ancestral coding to one day
thrust arms wide and take hold this earth
wresting it from a generation
that did not deserve it
Their wild infant hearts will one day make whole again
soil and sky and oxygen and humanity
They will claim it audaciously
An unapologetic child’s belief in magic

All I wanted to do was hit sixty and be fabulous
Party a little too hard and do the next-morning walk of shame
with the straps of my resale Steve Maddens in my teeth
Instead I keep skimming back over this hope
of the consecrated newborn
taking over this world
but have found it hard to find its pulse
without losing breath
And that very thought
feels an insult to the memory
of George and Breonna and Elijah
but I gear up     strap on     start my way
through an untilled jungle
ready to be one in the revolution
even leaning in just a bit for the rending of thorns
against bare arms
The tiniest symbol of atonement
for all my self-absorbed days
A flash of grace from a tubercular year