Pichchenda Bao

Big poetry weekend coming up! Can’t wait to join the lineup at A Persistence of Cormorants in Brooklyn. This is such a cool reading series and space. Come out to Brooklyn! Next Sunday! 1:30 PM. 165 2nd Street. Brooklyn. I’ll be trying out some new poems!

This times a thousand, and it's messed up how a political assassination just kind of fell out of the news right away.

White supremacist terrorism and anti-abortion terrorism serve the same goal—solidifying white, cis, male power—and they work in tandem, bleeding into each other. And until we take anti-abortion violence seriously, it will continue to be a training ground for broader white supremacist terrorism.

I Long for My Old World - A Poem from Gaza I long for the girl who saw each new day as a chance,Not a wall. The girl who believed in a future full of promise.

www.palestinechronicle.com/i-long-for-m...

I’ve been so privileged to work with a few young Palestinian writers through We Are Not Numbers (WANN). One of them, Taqwa Ahmed al-Wawi, has gone on to publish more pieces in other venues since then. I am so proud and in awe of her spirit and determination to make her own future.

Today!

murder is bad and if you feel that way then hopefully you also agree mass murder is bad

Pichchenda Bao: “To the Man Speeding Through the Crosswalk” - Cultural Daily A poem by Cambodian American poet Pichchenda Bao: "No one else was there. / No one else but you knows / how close we come / to calamity."

Read the rest of the poem: www.culturaldaily.com/pichchenda-b...

Mark my words and please understand: They erase your history so that they can erase your rights.

Free at noon tomorrow at AWP in LA? Come to our offsite reading at the Arts District Brewery Company! I’ll be trying out some new poems with Nancy Agabian, Catherine Fletchers, Jared Harél, Mary Lannon, & Vaughn Watson. I love these writers so much. I hope you’ll join us.

The important thing to understand about the Trump administration is that it is always lying. It isn't simply indifferent to the truth; it has contempt for it and for those who tell it. This must be broadly understood.

It’s important to understand that when a white person says “this has never happened before” or compares some oppressive behavior to a foreign regime, but it *did* happen here to Black/brown people for years/decades/centuries, it represents a massive blow to solidarity. It’s selfish.

When the history of this time is written down, the cowardice will be remembered as much as the fascism

I think some in the Senate have convinced themselves that the backlash to folding will be limited to “the left” and therefore ignorable.

Those people are deeply and profoundly misreading the moment and the stakes.

Virtually every swing district House Dem walked the plank to vote NO for a reason.

People convince themselves that animals can’t feel or think but desperately believe that a computer program that spews out summaries is something magical and intelligent

Dear LA, I’ll be in your neck of the woods in a couple weeks!

The ‘can machines do creative writing’ thing is mostly a distraction from the use of the machines to go through text and images to cancel grants and put people on deportation lists

OF THE EMPIRE We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

From a poetry collection by Mary Oliver, where after a hundred poems showcasing gentle observations on nature and animals, she hits you with this

Not hearing enough noise about Mahmoud Khalil from folks who like to quote the "first they came for" poem. Y'all get that the point is that they came for controversial, easily othered groups first, right? Now, it's trans people, immigrants, and student activists. Your turn will come. Fight now.

Right now there is clear, overwhelming opposition to Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction across the moderate, liberal, progressive & left spectrum. This kind of loud unity is what authoritarians are afraid of. To keep it up we need every institution & public leader to join the chorus.

Fuck — and I truly mean this from the deepest well of my spirit — Hakeem Jeffries

WTF?!
Watch the WH start revoking citizenship.
Dangerous Times.
@aoc.bsky.social