I want

This has been a particularly awful stretch of American history. Buffalo, Uvalde, and now the Supreme Court ruling on women’s rights have left us bereft. Jordan Jace, a contemporary Black poet born in Los Angeles, wrote “I Want” in order to “write a poem about optimism and fostering a culture of revolution.” Two worthy goals.

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I want
by Jordan Jace

I want to write poems for construction workers and dreamers 

For revolutionaries 

For deadbeats and those on the low 

I never want to ask please fix us all 

I want for us to want 

to patch every heart 

and pave every road 

and destroy every system 

that has ever left us 

broken.  I want to sing 

like frank ocean, like wonder 

like sonder, like mereba, like the sea 

I want to recite the line 

Took the wretched out the earth 

Called it baby fanon, 

I want to call somebody baby. 

I want to stop smoking because I want to live, 

I can only love my comrades if I live, 

And I want to clean my room, 

I want to clean my room every week 

and make my bed and put peppermint in my hair 

to stop needing my inhalers 

and to inhale solidarity, and to eat the rich, 

I want to eat the rich, to cancel the rents, 

to know my neighbors 

and to know my neighbors 

are safe.  I want to move like water, to move 

from unity to struggle to unity, 

to have no perfect world we haven’t fought for.