The body is like a computer
unless you’re a doctor or computer scientist
you have no idea how it works
you turn it on, wake up in the morning
(if you’re lucky, supposedly)
and in the middle of doing something
writing a story, planning a trip,
adding to your calendar, making breakfast,
reading, dressing to go for a walk on this sunny, 
sometimes cloudy day
there’s a break in flow
a freeze
a sharp pain
a fainting spell

You try everything
pressing buttons, calling your doctor
or technical support, waiting 
half an hour or more listening to repetitive
fragments of music you would never choose 
in your life, the perhaps very little of it
you have left, to get questions answered
What’s happening?
How do I fix it?

The perennial, essential questions:
What’s happening?
How do I fix it? 
and       How long do I have?

When it comes to the body or computers
we rely on technicians, doctors, gods, goddesses,
shamans, rabbis, imams or priests
hoping to be guided to the answers
to remember not to panic next time
when no one knows
or what they know doesn’t fix it
no matter how many words fill the abyss

What about if you’re a poet, musician or sculptor?
How do you find your answers as you mold the dark
making matter from shadows of just beyond reach?
The cut of a chisel, the learning of slanted rhyme 
or augmented flat 7ths, is that where they lie?

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You who I wish I loved, the neighbor with such a huge American flag 
outside your home I hope you trip on it as you go back and forth 
to your gas guzzling car, outgassing clothing detergent and dryer sheets 
as your kind of American is more scared of smells than guns

You who I wish I loved, a family who when we moved in
were so nice and helped us unpack the furniture 
and brought over a bottle of wine and Italian bread 
as a welcome to the neighborhood who now barely look our way
as they revealed too much of their lives that first year, 
the model of a family where it’s all Fantastic 
when their house is shrouded in silence

You who I wish I loved, the yelping beagle and its owner 
on the other side who said How do you think he feels
when I told her I felt like my home wasn’t my home 
because every time I moved or breathed
the dog would howl like it was being strangled

You who I wish I loved, the teacher who was my devotee, 
who wrote poetry in my class, every time I taught her students, 
whom I published, who when the funding was gone, 
didn’t answer my emails

You who I wish I loved, people who take my tax money 
and spend it on weapons and prisons and themselves 
instead of schools, health and love

You who I wish I loved, my former partners

You who I wish I loved, the way a friend texts me to say 
Let’s talk it’s been a while when he should say Let me talk 
for an hour and shut down when you say something about yourself

You who I wish I loved, another friend who I helped write a book 
and thanked everybody in her life but me

You who I wish I loved, all the people who send me rejection letters 
when I open up my heart through words

You who I wish I loved, the homeless woman 
who shouted at me when I offered her a bottle of water, 
saying I know what you can do, take me to your house 
and make me dinner, whose feistiness and fortitude I do love

You who I wish I loved, books that become “New York Times bestsellers” 
so the reading public goes out to buy them and they do become bestsellers

You who I wish I loved instead of envied, the list is too long

You who I do love is beside me no matter all my tantrums, 
you who I love I never had to wish for.

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You can kill the singers, but you can’t kill the song
You can kill the mockingbirds, but you can’t kill the mocking
You can burn the books, but you can’t burn the words
You can carry your rifles, but you can’t shoot the spirit
You can cover your faces, but you can’t hide evil
You can spray your fire hoses, but you can’t extinguish the fire
You can break down the door, but you can’t shatter the people
You can spit out your hatred, but you can’t stop love

Inspired by Joseph Fasano’s Lorca (after Neruda)

It is unknown how many people have died in ICE custody; The Guardian has reported that numbers have been rising: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/04/ice-2025-deaths-timeline

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Stopped at a red light
on Randall and San Bruno
more of a boulevard than avenue
smashing my fists into the steering wheel
sobbing like a banshee
I would be a she no longer
not without my breast
now scattered with cancer

There was no way
I could traverse the gorge
the never going to be the same
I was losing my womanhood
that I didn’t before know was about my breast
and mother and nourishment

Eyes open in terror 
while blindly waiting for Stop to Go
an ancient oak tree across the wide expanse
floats into view; tall, stalwart and thickly branched
leaves of brown turning to green
its roots spreading beneath asphalt and cement
with the thought love is the life force
It is not breast or body or mother or father
ancestor or doctor or Father in the Sky
but a river flowing to and from us, and not us

With a gun pointing at your face
whether metal, cellular or the thrashing 
waves of an icy sea or strait
comes the call of the clarion 
as it wends its singular way across the gorge
cleaving away what does not matter, 
leaving only whether to ride the river
be green leaf or brown

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This morning I woke and said
I can’t believe the monster is dead
I hadn’t remembered the anniversary
of my father’s death two days
and twenty one years ago

Passing is a better word
as in passing the baton
like all men with batons
whose guns and fists 
form imprints on the cells
of those in their path
on their road to glory

Their imprint forever
shaping lives
residing in blood
the eyes and ears
and the soil and soul
of home and homefullness

Monster not the best word
resting as it does 
on impotence and rage
Let us speak from above
from our own tongues
disappear them from the pages of His story
while we write ourstory and fly,
as the song says, like little sparrows

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Funnily enough, I’m terrible at marketing and never did anything to promote them so they continue to sit on Etsy with hardly any sales. However, over the years, the one that has sold is Do You Know Who I Am?.

The slogan came to me from when I was teaching in the county jail and one of my students, a gang leader, got mad at me for telling him to do his work.

Do you know who I am? he said, coming up on me threateningly.

Without stopping to think, I said, Do you know who I am?

Luckily, he was so caught off guard that he laughed and switched gears.

I’m puzzled by why this slogan is the one that’s grabbed people the most. Is it because we live in the Age of Narcissism (not my intention to promote)? Because, like my student, people get the irony? For me, Where’s My Sock? is a lot funnier, as is, especially for a baby, a bib that reads, It Wasn’t Me. (I made the mistake of sending this as a gift for the newborn of a colleague, who never thanked me.)

I’m sort of a transplant here in the US and maybe it’s simply a matter of living in a country where irony is not threaded into the culture. Maybe it’s too British or Jewish, I mused. So I asked an Israeli friend, Do you think these shirts would go down well in Israel?

No, she said with great adamance. They don’t have a sense of humor, and if they do, it’s more on the silly, like people falling down.

I have to admit, seeing Peter Sellers falling over couches in his Pink Panther movies always makes me burst out laughing.

But back to the point, much of the popular British humor I was exposed to as I was growing up was also silly, full of bodily function jokes.

So where do I go to find my comrades in irony? A friend thinks I may have some French in me, the great purveyors of ironical discourse as they are. My last, and first, name, may lend that suggestion as well. As the story goes, my great great great x whatever Jewish grandfather apparently was from France and deserted from Napoleon’s army invasion into Russia and stayed there. The nomenclature Margo was more random; my parents went to a ballet the night before I was born and saw Margot Fontaine perform (did they see the t?) and landed on that.

Honestly, many people don’t get my humor. Whether they’re listening, I can’t always tell. My partner tells me it took her ten years to realize I was funny. Luckily, we’ve had many more years of her laughing at my quips, when she’s not too busy. And sometimes when in company, should I say often, I make the mistake of not reading the room, inciting stone silences.

I can see how Do you know who I am? speaks to people as a ubiquitous comeback to being treated like a persona non grata, like for one woman who bought 14 mugs to be sent to her work address and someone else who sent her mother a tote bag as a gift for Mother’s Day. It can also come in handy on a practical level: I wear the shirt, in black with large white lettering, whenever I have a medical procedure in case I leave with the wrong part of my body missing.

But why isn’t Half of me is happy or What wouldn’t my inner critic say appealing to people? Or what I made for my whirlwind of a partner in our ever-faster paced world, I was here a minute ago?

As we recently went through our expenses to prepare for taxes, my partner marveled at how many sales I made as the revenue shows on our bank account. I had to confess that it was me buying shirts for friends, who thankfully share my sense of humor. I mean someone has to.

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Thirty-one, said my partner.

There was a silence in the blackness beneath the bowl of glittering planets and stars. Then the little girl’s voice came wafting over.

I’m lucky, she said.

Why? asked my partner.

Because I’m only eight and I’m going to live a lot longer than you.

My partner laughed.

As they continued to look up at Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Orion, my partner explained the theory of relativity to her.

So you see, my partner finished, even though I’m already 31 and you’re only eight, how long we live is all relative.

There was a pause. Then the little girl’s voice floated through the blackness.

So what have you been doing all these years?

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Between the Stars is part of a collection-in-progress entitled “I See You” which includes I Wish I Didn’t See You, Meltdown on the 67, I See You, When A Street Is A House and Delivery.

I went for a walk one lovely evening and took a seat at an outside table at a small restaurant on the main street in the old town, the only diner at that hour of eight o’clock. It was a Sunday and perhaps people who would have dined were busy getting ready for coming off the weekend for their Monday.

I ordered a steak, which was delicious, and unusual for me as I hardly drink, a glass of red wine. As I sat before a basket of fresh white rolls and my glass of wine, partaking of the glistening red meat and colorful salad, I chewed every mouthful in golden light as the sun slowly set and the warm evening unfolded. I was in utter bliss, satiated both with the food and the exquisite surroundings.

With my glass in hand, I took a sip of the red wine and sat back in my chair. An image of my father appeared; he would sit back in his chair with a glass of red wine, luxuriating in his power and control over his seven children, wife, and all the people he stole from. A king at the top of the world. And now this was me, in this position, but a teacher, a writer, a poet, able to have a beautiful meal in a beautiful place, eat what I wanted, drink a full glass of red wine, all by myself.

My father might have stolen everything from me in my childhood and its unhappy consequences, but I had arrived, no longer the by-product of a thief.

After the sun had set and I was done with my meal and ready to move along, I took a walk along the empty street. Suddenly I became aware that someone was following me, a wisp of a figure cloaked in the pitch black night. The footsteps were unmistakably male and predatory; this was not the first time I, or any woman, had been followed while out on a walk.

I quickened my step. His grew even more rapid and he was just about upon me when I stopped in front of a shoe shop along the promenade. I perused the shoes as if I were interested in the shop’s fare. Feeling his presence come up a hair breadth behind me, I spun around and threw my arms in the air, mumbling gibberish as loud as I could. Luckily, I had done a self-defense course and even more luckily, I remembered at that moment that predators are frightened by insanity. He jumped back and started racing down the street away from me, disappearing into the black night.

I might be a woman at the mercy of men and patriarchy, and I might be the daughter of a violent trickster, but no longer was that going to define me.

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I often wondered what I would have done
when Hitler came to power
Jews rounded up, along with “loose women” 
gays, people with disabilities, people with color, 
dissidents and Roma
Just like Latinos, Arabs, Africans, Asians
and even some original inhabitants
today in this One Nation Under God

When I didn’t yet know I was the granddaughter
of Eastern European Jews fleeing from pogroms
I thought I would be a hero
protecting Jews, hiding them in a closet or cupboard
shielding them from the gestapo 
and brownshirts in cities    el campo    towns
who roved like the bounty hunters of today 
in my state and country

Today in my state and country
from parking lots our gestapo and brownshirts
wearing gray masks and black hoods
grab families shopping for food, clothes, diapers,
and workers going about their business 

And in fields where our food is grown
Proud Boys in ICE uniforms 
pop out from behind bushes,
circling fields filled with grape, apple,
potato pickers who race from their grasp
hauling parents from howling children

When I found out I am Jewish,
not religious how can you believe in god
in this unholy earth, 
but Jewish by heritage and looks
the scars of my forebears’ tortures
became mine, carved into my cells, 
They came for me a map of my history 

Today in my state and country
I see neighbors         yellow stars 
Illegal Aliens           Der Untermensch
detention camps       transit camps
unmarked cars          boxcars
fenced tent cities      walled ghettos

I often wondered what I would have done
when Hitler came to power
Jews rounded up, along with “loose women” 
gays, people with disabilities, people with color, 
dissidents and Roma

Now so help me godless
it is no longer time to wonder

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Come, blow away my worry like ivy strangling a redwood tree

choking the nourishment rising from its roots

When will the terrorist attacks come

exploding from the cells of a diseased country

not our own, on this diseased country of ours

men fighting wars, where are the women in all this?

Come and drown the rage of those with guns in their groins

shooting at whatever makes them feel disempowered

like grass and bees and hummingbirds and women and girl children

or boys whose blossoms bloom in spite of the prevailing winds

Come to burn with your solar fire the skies

filled with satellites instead of stars, missiles instead of sun rays

and leave in their wake a trail of moonlight and the Milky Way

all those diamonds and sparkling necklaces that children

see themselves reflected in, erupt your volcanos

over the guns and tanks and parades held by those

who fear that you and not they are the gods that rule the earth

the solar system and the spirit world, they are circus performing

pawns of Jung’s shadows to blind us from

stop, look, listen that we were taught in our youth

Come to the redwood tree, the sun, the stars, the soil on which we stand

with no god, no guns, forever and ever amen.

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Gordon, my best friend, he was 79 when he died. He'd been called a sissy growing up. His father beat him. His mother dressed him in girls' baby clothes because she wanted a girl. He joined the Navy at 18 and left his family for good, to go gaily forward, as he would say. He never told his family he was gay and his dying wish was, Get rid of my magazines.

We cleaned out his things, his family, Peter and I. A stack of journals was lined up on a shelf above the coffee table I now have in my living room. The journals were different colors, gray, green, light blue, indigo, each one most likely given to him as birthday gifts, or just because people loved him. And each one empty except for three pages in the black one, where he was complaining about something or other. He wanted to be a writer, our Gordon. That was how I met him.

When I entered the workshop I was teaching in the lesbian and gay center in—was it San Anselmo? I am close to the age he was when we met, but even then his memory was better than mine. All I heard were people calling Gordon! Gordon! Gordon! until this beautiful man walked in, with a thick white beard and head of hair, barrel-chested and soft spoken, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a large turquoise ring he would leave to his nephew, a puzzle ring.

I fell in love with him immediately. This wide-berthed, funny, sarcastic, refined large bear of a man, unpretentious—unless he was around someone he fancied, sexually awkward as he was. All those fatherly beatings and confused signals from mom, it took him time to trust and warm up to me. I pursued him for months. I knew he was good people, I knew instinctively he would be the brother I never had, though I had three, but he was a reluctant receiver.

I had a dream a few months after meeting him that he was old, dressed in yellow, sitting in a wheelchair in his blue carpeted living room. I was looking after him. He was only in his early sixties then and fit as a fiddle. He still rode horses with his friend in Oregon every summer, backpacking into the wilderness. I phoned him, Gordon, are you all right? And that was it. Best friends until five p.m. on November 10th, 2009, when his body was about to be taken from him. His spirit had already flown away, he was no longer there. I knew there was no point in staying and left his family to say their goodbyes. One and a half hours later, I got the call.

His AARP magazines were still on the coffee table in his flat, he always kept the table mirror bright, unlike I would end up doing. He was so fastidious; when he went out, he left his thermostat on 58 all year round. On the counter beside the large window in his sunny kitchen, bottles of Ensure my wife and I had left him as he shriveled to half his size, unopened.

I wanted to bathe him, but he wouldn't let me. I wanted to go to his oncologist with him, but he would just let me one time, and only when I wore him down. He told me I wasn't allowed to ask any questions. Gordon, this big strong bear of a man managed by not always facing what was happening.

But I followed the doctor out into the corridor and did ask, seeing Gordon suffering with oozing sores puffing his lips and inside his mouth. The cancer treatment was only making him worse. I asked the doctor, what are the chances of the chemo working?

And he said, two years tops. But then I asked him another question and he said, for younger men.

Gordon’s memorial was arranged by his family in a sterile meeting room at a hotel in downtown San Francisco. On their request, I had printed out the stories that Gordon had written over the years in my workshops and gave a copy to each one of them. I read one out as my eulogy. No one spoke about him being gay. They must have known.

The things Gordon left were few and beautiful. My wife loved pottery and took some mugs he collected from a gallery he worked in decades before; he had such refined taste. Along with the coffee table, I took a yellow pitcher inscribed Gordon's Gin in red script that has a place of honor on our kitchen shelf. I didn’t take the brass framed photo of me in his living room. I didn’t like how I looked but he saw something in me that not that many people did, and I loved him for that.

But I did take his brass clock to have him with me every time I checked the time. The clock suddenly stopped working a few months ago, fifteen years almost to the day he died. I put it in my car to get it fixed, but it would cost $200, so I left it in the car, not able to discard it. A few weeks later, the second hand was rotating again. Movement had brought it to life, and I remembered a poem I wrote that had the line ‘an object in motion keeps moving forward’. Gordon’s body didn’t, but that didn’t mean the same for his spirit.

Gordon didn't want to be buried anywhere. He didn't want to have a headstone. He donated his body to science, and he told me that after they had removed his organs - was it sardonically? - hospital staff would float out on a boat to the bay and empty his remains in the water. I always felt bad about that, that I had no physical place to remember him, only my heart and my memories. And so when I moved to Santa Rosa a few years after he died, I made my own. On a walk to the top of Taylor Mountain, not far from where I live, I came upon an area where others had piled stones into sculptures. I gathered some small rocks and made a memorial to Gordon so that every time I walked on the mountain, I could sit with him.

Now it’s sixteen years after he died and though I’m no longer able to climb the mountain, Gordon still sometimes visits me in my dreams. He's always healthy and he's always loving and he's always got a slightly sarcastic comment like, His ego is the size of Chicago. He had the best sayings.

I still laugh at what he said on his deathbed to a volunteer who wandered into his hospital room with a small harp asking, “What would you like me to play?”

I wasn’t even sure it was appropriate; no one had asked for music. It seemed a little presumptuous to assume someone in the intimate throes of death wanted to hear music, let alone played by someone they didn’t know.

Gordon was too weak to respond, so Peter said, “He loves anything by Mahler.”

The volunteer began strumming a Mahler tune, and suddenly from Gordon’s bed came a groan, “Not Mahler!” as if his dislike of the music was his rallying cry.

Peter looked shocked. All those years they had been going to concerts together, at least several of them by Mahler, and Gordon had never said a word.

Even before I had insisted that Gordon let me take him to the hospital the chemo had clearly not been working, it made him even sicker as he lay dying. My wife and I asked him if he thought he should stop taking the pills, but he was still believing what his oncologist had said without revealing that it wasn’t going to work. I couldn't stand to see him suffer any longer and one night, about a week and a half after he was admitted, I found the palliative care doctor in a dimly lit alcove near Gordon’s room. I asked whether the chemo could be stopped so Gordon wouldn’t be in such pain and discomfort.

Under the dim night lighting, the doctor, a gentle-voiced man in his forties, said that requests to stop treatment had to be made by the patient.

“How can I persuade him?” I asked.

“Ask him whether he would like us to do everything medically necessary or to stop the chemo,” he said.

I went to Gordon’s bed and said softly into his ear, “Gordon, would you like them to do whatever’s medically necessary or to stop?”

Gordon barely missed a beat. With grace he said, “Tomorrow will be fine.”

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I went to the skin doctor the other day, to check a weird blemish on my face. It’s a fancy schmancy kind of office, with leather chairs in the waiting room. They obviously do a lot of cosmetic persuasion, but they take my insurance and I can always get an appointment, so there I went.

The doctor came in with a mask on - I’m immune compromised so this is important to me - but the nurse didn’t. So I asked if she could please put on a mask. She and the doctor exchanged a look, but she went out and came back wearing one.

Meanwhile, the doctor said, “How are you?”

I thought I’d save her from what I usually answer as I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. So I said, “Fine. How are you?”

“Fine,” she said.

“As the world is falling apart,” I added wryly. I mean, how can anybody be “fine” right now? With the brutal assaults on anything good anywhere and everywhere by the Bully and the Billionaire.

“My world isn’t falling apart!” she said jovially with a bounce in her step, her blue pants and shirt uniform seeming to bounce along with her.

Oh fuck, I thought. One of them.

I would have left right away except that my regular healthcare practice doesn’t have any openings for dermatology.

I showed her the spot on my face. “I can’t see it, but it’s so weird, every so often it starts bleeding.”

“I don’t see anything,” she said, looking through the microscopic attachment to her examination glasses.

“Why do you think it’s happening?” I asked.

“I can’t make it up if there’s nothing,” she said offhandedly, flapping her hand as if she was ready to kick me out the door.

“Wait,” I said, “can you also please check the rest of my face?” I’ve had a few skin cancers, so I wanted to make sure there weren’t any more.

She’d taken off her glasses but put them on again and started examining my skin. I pointed out a few areas to help her along with what I’d noticed, seeing as she cared so much.

She said a few incomprehensible words to describe what she was seeing. “These can come off with electrolysis, I get them all the time and take them off. But I have to charge you $250 to remove them. Insurance doesn’t cover it.”

“You’re lucky you get to take them off for free,” I said only half-jokingly.

“Oh, I do all kinds of stuff,” she said. “Tonight I’m going to Botox the heck off my face.”

Oh my god, I thought, get me the eff out of here.

This time she took off her mask to remove the microscopic attachment to her glasses. After she put the exam glasses back on, she didn’t also put her face mask back, and leaned her face close to mine to examine my forehead.

“Sorry, I said,” could you please put your mask back on?” Mine was still off as she was examining me.

“I had to take it off to remove my glasses,” she said with a huff. But she put it back on. Then she looked down at me. “Put your mask on,” she said curtly. “If I have mine on, you should have yours on.”

My silent effin’ god multiplied.

She touched my forehead, “I’ll have to burn these off so they don’t turn into cancer.”

She aimed the burner high at my forehead and shot the cold spray aggressively, a bit longer than I thought necessary, and then at another little spot near my eyebrow.

Then it was out of there she went, with the nurse scurrying behind her.

Never again. A Trumper for sure, Botox and all.

When I got home, I called my healthcare practice again, only to find out they were still not taking patients. The assistant told me they have a waiting list of 700.

What I should have said was, put me down as 701. Instead, I’ll be looking for someone in San Francisco, 60 miles from where I live, hoping for someone who cares.

*The collection “I See You” includes I See You, Meltdown on the 67, When A Street Is A House and Delivery.

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How does one keep one’s sanity clause, in the words of Harpo Marx, when we have such a president? When so much of what we know to be true is said to be a lie, and blatant lies are presented—and reported—as reality? This poem is an attempt to answer that question, from my own experience.

My mother said we spent 
6 months in Mexico
1½ years in Nassau
1½ in Jacksonville
1½ years in Miami Beach
 
6 months + 1½ years + 1½ years + 1½ years = 5 years
 
I was 10 years old 
when we moved back to New York
7 when we’d left
 
10 – 7 = 3

It used to be said there were two sexes
Later the word gender was used
as if we’re all either male or female
Not a range of female or male 
as if we exist on a spectrum
just like our political views
our social status, our preferences
our individual and collective selves
And then non-binary added to the list,
formerly androgynous, to describe 
people who might look 
like a particular sex or gender
but not identify with it

Are we who we are
or how we identify? I wanted to be 
seen as a somebody like my brothers
but I wasn’t a boy
I wanted to be seen as smart
but there wasn’t room for smart
a title held by my father 
and the eldest, his confidante
when he felt like it
I was always an artist 
but not for me either
my sister was the artist

In a family of seven children
with only room for one 
I was the middle child, lost 
in the shuffle as my mother 
with her blank eyes 
would say in later years
when I was still trying to get 
her o sole mio attention

Male, female, male-to-female, 
female-to-male, non-binary; 
if we want to categorize
why not five genders? Isn’t that
saying what is, is? A man who never
had a period, can he be a woman?
If I identify as a somebody, 
does that mean I will be seen 
as a somebody?

Isn’t saying that we were away three years,
naming the years and months in each place
an anchor thrown in the waters of confusion
the arithmetic I want to live by?
Isn’t naming the $25 billion denied 
to end child hunger, when $400 billion 
is owned by one of the two 
who are unmooring 250 years 
of not good enough
to the worst it could be? 

How many numbers are needed 
to count the damage of not seeing
real as real, for not naming, for not living
by In the beginning there was the Word,
and to paraphrase by this one non-religious person, 
and the Word is Power? 

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Still I Rise

Maya Angelou 



You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may tread me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.



Does my sassiness upset you? 

Why are you beset with gloom? 

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.



Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.



Did you want to see me broken? 

Bowed head and lowered eyes? 

Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

Weakened by my soulful cries.



Does my haughtiness offend you? 

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin' in my own back yard.



You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise.



Does my sexiness upset you? 

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs? 



Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise



I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise



Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

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That afternoon in my fourth grade class, a boy with long hair falling into his face slouched in his chair, looking miserable. As I was setting up for the poetry activity, he snapped at the classroom teacher when she told him to get his notebook out for poetry. When she said it again, in a calm voice, he blurted, “I don’t care!” 

My attention zeroed in on him. As I tried to pull him into the lesson and settle his mood, I asked him what he loved, love being the topic for the day. 

“My brother, tacos and ju-jitsu,” he said, seeming surprised to be called on. I wrote that on the board and then added what the other kids called out.

As I continued the lesson, and the students began writing their love poems, I spent more time with him than the others, as he still seemed to be fuming about something. In spite of his mood, he completed the task and volunteered to read out his poem, along with several other students.

After class, I asked him to come outside. He looked scared through his aggressive stance while the teacher raised an eyebrow at me, a what’s-going-on?

He turned away as we stood across from each other in the narrow space outside the classroom. 

“Do you ever say pissed off?” I began, knowing I was crossing a line between teacher and student. Let’s just go for it, I thought, maybe this will help him open up.

He nodded, glanced up for a second, then back at his feet, shuffling awkwardly as if he wanted to get away.

“You seem really pissed off,” I said. “What’s going on?”

He shrugged.

“You did so great in the poetry class, but you just look so unhappy, like you don’t want to be here.” 

“I don’t,” he said loudly. 

“Where would you rather be?”

“At ju-jitsu. But I can’t go.” He looked utterly miserable.

“Why not?”

“It takes me ten minutes to get home, and it starts ten minutes before I can get there.”

“Oh, that’s a drag,” I said. “Are there other times you can go?”

“There’s only three, and they’re all at the same time.” Then he growled, “School is getting in the way of ju-jitsu.”

I laughed inside, what a way to express it, for a nine-year-old. 

On my way home, still tickled by his response, I thought of all that might be getting in my way. How about laundry? Or heart disease? Or death?

When I came back in with him to the classroom to get my bag and for him to pack up and leave, the teacher came over and asked, “What did I miss?”

“He’s upset because he can’t get to his ju-jitsu as it starts too early.”

“That’s not true,” she said, turning away.

I added to my list, People who don’t believe kids.

I was stopped at a traffic light one day in San Francisco, waiting for it to turn green, when I saw this man enjoying the morning.

At the corner of Guerrero and Duboce

Not in the city of angels

A man of indeterminate age

Outside a city-worn Kentucky Fried Chicken

Pants, jacket, wooly cap living-on-the-street crusted and gray

A small suitcase knee high, one wheel broken

Rests at his feet as he stands, legs in perfect symmetry

He extends his arms high and wide

In a dance of morning awakening

At the end of his long arms, hands outstretched

A pantomime of winged birds

Long delicate fingers reaching high as they can go

Tips touching the blue sky

He stands in an ecstasy of luxury, then

Sits back down beside his suitcase

And waits

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This is part of a collection of nonfiction entitled “I See You”, about people whose experiences live in the shadows. The collection includes When A Street Is A House and Delivery.

A woman in a wheelchair got onto the bus after Dee and I had sat down near the disabled access area. We were lucky to get seats. The 67 was packed on this humid summer afternoon, filled with shoppers with carrier bags stuffed to the brim, grumpy looking older men and harried mothers trying to rein in school-aged children on their summer break. As usual on London transport, no one was paying attention to anyone else, but looking straight ahead in hopeful anonymity.

When the woman, pink-haired and in summer festival style pants and tie-dyed t-shirt, couldn’t get her wheelchair around a man blocking the aisle, she asked him politely if he could move.

“I’m on the phone,” he said loudly, and continued his conversation while more passengers got on the bus.

“Please, I can’t get into that space,” she said, indicating the area reserved for wheelchairs.

“I’m on the phone,” he said again, bristling with irritation while other passengers brushed past him on the other side. 

The woman reddened slightly. “I can’t get my chair in the space, I need more room.”

“Go around me,” he said, shooting her a dirty look. “You can get in there.”

He ignored Dee and I calling out, “Let her pass!” while the woman kept trying to maneuver around him.

Suddenly, still with his phone to his ear, he strode angrily off the bus.

The woman was finally able to get into the space. A tall, bulky man, also in bright festival clothing, gave her a resigned look as he tried to edge in beside her.

Dee stood up. “Would you like to sit down?” she said to him.

“Yes.” He sighed in relief. “Thank you.” 

Just then a passenger in his fifties standing at the front of the bus called loudly,  “That man with you, he's not disabled. What do you mean you're giving him your seat? I'm disabled. Why did you give up your seat to him?”

“I am disabled,” the woman’s friend said.

“Would you like to sit down?” I called to the man up front.

“No,” he said irately. “I don't want to sit down.” He pulled out a red and white card from his wallet and waved it around. “I’m disabled.” He went on more vociferously. “Look at him. He's not disabled. She is. I know.” 

Dee and I called out in unison, “You can't always tell when someone's disabled.”

  “Oh my god,” I said to the woman and her friend as the man kept up his tirade. “Is this what you have to deal with?” 

“Yeah, “ she said. “We do a lot.” Her voice was just as mild as before. “The bus driver didn't want me to get onto the bus. He didn't even want to lower the step.” 

Her friend joined in, “This happens all the time.”

The man at the front of the bus, seeing us talking to each other, started yelling again. “He didn’t even pay his fare. Now he's saying he's disabled. I’m disabled! And you gave him your seat.”

Dee rolled her eyes and turned away. But I said, pretending to be concerned, “Would you like to sit down?” hoping that would stop his ranting.

“You seem like a reasonable person,” he said to me in a more measured voice. “He’s not disabled.”

“Look,” I said, calmly. “You know, you can't always tell when somebody's disabled. I wouldn’t know you were either.”

But the man only kept up his griping, he just wouldn't stop.

I turned to the woman and her friend. “Do you write? Because if you're dealing with this all the time, what about if you write an opinion piece to the newspaper? Or a letter. Because people really need to know.”

They looked at me, bemused. “This goes on all the time.”

I said, “It’s, like, there but for the grace of god, go I. People, they don't understand unless they've been through it.”

I could feel the woman’s friend stiffening at the mention of god, not sure if it was because I’d referred to religion, or because it could have sounded patronizing. But the woman nodded. “Yeah, we know.”

“Is there a shuttle, some kind of special transportation so you can avoid all this?”

“Yes,” her friend said, “but you have to plan in advance, we just wanted to take a spontaneous trip.”

“Oh my god. And you're not allowed to be spontaneous, bloody hell. You really handle this well.”

I didn’t realize how well until they got off the bus and I saw pinned to the back of the woman’s wheelchair, “I need fucking room.”

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Propped against a low wall outside the public library, a woman was putting on makeup, grooming herself as if for a date. With meticulous strokes, she applied eyeliner, mascara, face powder, lipstick; bright red lipstick. Actually, not such a bright red. Magenta red. 

A ponytail was pitched haphazardly on the top of her head to keep her hair out of the way. She was completely absorbed, focused on her task, oblivious to passersby and loud traffic pulling up short at the busy intersection next to her spot.

Her jeans were just right, not too tight, with rhinestones layered on the front pockets. Beside her was a baby carriage, partly overflowing with soiled clothing, torn out pages of magazines, and various dirty plastic objects, perhaps randomly picked from garbage cans or the street.

Her hair looked clean, fluffy and soft. And she had on a quilted jacket, with no dirt or grease stains you’d expect from street living. 

After she was fully made up, checked with a small pocket mirror she held at different angles to her face, she walked a few feet away, eyes turned inward. Then she went back and began rummaging inside a brown paper bag marked “groceries” poking out of the carriage. She shifted a few things and pulled out an open bag of potato chips.

Walking away again, but this time to another adjacent spot on the street, she began eating the chips, one by one, with a ruminative look on her face. She moved a little ways away and slightly sideways, directing her eyes outward, as if peering from behind a window.

She’d started in her bathroom, moved into the kitchen to get some food, and then hung out in her living room to eat and look at the world outside.

She headed back to the baby carriage, sorted her belongings into different areas, tidying up as one does before leaving the house. Then she turned her baby carriage toward the intersection and disappeared around the corner.

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When I was teaching at a charter school in the county jail in San Francisco, I had three white supremacists in my class, big guys, with thick necks, shaved heads and pockmarked faces. They kept to themselves, the only white students in the class, and were always together, one with a HATE tattoo splayed on his fingers.

I’d taken the job when, after seven years of teaching writing workshops in the jail, funding from an arts nonprofit ran out. At the charter school, I was supposed to be teaching various subjects in humanities, but whatever subject was assigned any given semester, I turned into personal narrative writing. Because when we’re in touch with who we are deep down, it’s harder to hurt ourselves and others. And sharing our stories allows us to swim in the same river of humanity, something I wanted to do, too.

The first assignment was “Write your life story in twelve minutes”. Sometimes people would protest, I can’t do that! and I’d say, Just try it. And for some reason, that mostly worked. If not everyone wanted to go there, I’d tell them to write what wasn’t their life story. Either way, this was about opening a crack in the shield. 

I’d then give each student individual assignments over the weeks to unpack it from there. They didn't have to share their writing if they didn't want to, even with me, just so they would tell their truth—but without incriminating themselves, which could lead to further punishment.

During the very first class, a man with a scar running down his face, shoulders hunched as he walked, legs splayed, the proverbial tough guy, wrote: I could look at a movie on T.V. and start crying, yeah.  I don’t want nobody to know that side of me, but it’s part of me.  I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life but still there are only a few people in this world who really know me.  Some people know Roy the jailbird, some people know Roy the hustler, then some people know Roy the independent person who won’t ask anybody for anything.  There are still some who know me as the person they can always ask for something and get it.  At times I’m not sure which Roy am I....

There were never any fights breaking out between the different races or affiliations. Everyone wrote, and everyone mostly just kind of got along, or like the supremacists, kept to themselves. The men left their differences at the door except when they didn't, but for most, it wasn’t worth the loss of privileges to start fighting and incite officers to come in.  And in this class I was lucky; over time, a feeling of closeness developed between us as they shared their stories.

At the end of each session, which was about ten weeks long, I would say something that I especially appreciated about each student like, You’re so funny or, I loved how you always turned the story on its head at the end or, It was brilliant how you made that poem a song, things like that. And with these three guys, I said, You know, when you walked into my class, I was scared of you.

And they said, Why were you scared of us? 

I said, Because your people killed my people. 

They kind of fell apart and said, We would never hurt you, Margo. And then one of them wrote me a note that I found on his desk when I left that day. 

“You know, dear Margo, we would never think about hurting you.”

I thought, well, it really pays to come out with the truth sometimes. In more ways than one. 

It takes so little to be real and smash through the way we see each other. It’s easy to feel intimidated, to be scared of other people and do what you can to avoid any kind of confrontation. Especially when you’re a woman. But some men, too. During the pandemic, that first year when everyone was scared of catching Covid, it was pretty funny. It was the only time I ever saw white people crossing the street to avoid white people. 

But, you know, we're all in this system together, and the more we can do to break down barriers . . .

Another time in the jail, a line of men was being led out of a housing unit. One of the men said to me, Oh, I really like your outfit. Very flirty. Honestly, as a woman in a men’s jail, you could walk in dressed in a garbage bag and you’d still be flirted with. It’s not something you want to abuse.

I said with a grin, I wish I could say the same about yours. And they just cracked up. 

When you can use humor and be real and just treat people like they're people and not like they're stereotypes . . . Except when you’re on a dark street by yourself. Like the time I was in Perugia on a lonely street and taking a walk in the beautiful velvety air. I heard a man’s footsteps following me and thought, Oh shit. I stopped in front of a shoe shop as if curious about what shoes to buy at eleven at night. He stopped, too, and as he moved in for the kill, I remembered my self-defense training, spun around and started waving my hands and yelling jibberish, acting like I was crazy. Boy, did that perp jump and run back down the street as fast as he could.

My students used humor and challenged me to be real, too. One day, I mentioned that my sister had just told me she’d read that people who are nice are angry underneath. 

One student immediately piped up, “So what are you so angry about?”

I stopped mid-breath, startled. I was, indeed, furious about being raised in a sea of secrets by a criminal father on the run and denied my identity, how difficult it was to fit in anywhere with my multicultural background, my poor health that made me feel trapped in my body . . . It was a relief to teach and be focused on other people’s ills rather than my own.

I didn’t say anything cohesive at that moment, just stuttered something incomprehensible. But over time, I shared more of my life with them when they asked, aside from where I lived and my daily personal life. No matter how much I loved my students, they lived at a basic survival level and were savvy about how to get what they needed, and not always to the benefit of other people. I had to build proper boundaries around myself, no matter how close we became because of our work together.

As they did, too, under much greater threat than me, including what would happen to them if they broke whatever code was followed by them and their community. There were no guns in my life, and I wasn’t targeted by the prison industry.

Another student, the jail scribe who’d write love letters to the men’s girlfriends upon request, sat at the back for several weeks only writing Hallmark type poems, and assessing me with piercing eyes. He finally opened up and wrote about his life and when I passed by his desk, he slipped me a note on which was written: “From your deeper self, what is your incentive to help others write about what is underneath?”

That night I thought about it and wrote a poem in response, calling it Physics, in which I wove together their experiences and mine, and how we can easily feel we don’t matter. 

Men locked in the shadows / invisible anti-matter / sealed in sunless chambers / they cease to matter / or be matter / except to those who matter . . .

I read it in the following class. The men sat in silence afterwards, and then started clapping one by one. 

They got it, and I got it. No matter what, and how unfair it all is, we’re all in this world together. 

When students were released, I would organize readings in bookstores and libraries so they could share their writing, their poems, and their stories. There would be audience members, people who saw flyers and family members and friends, and so on. I would invite people from my other creative writing classes, people who were paying me a lot more than the jail did, and they were middle or upper class, mostly people who could afford to pay for classes, and they had the time to do that.

I would invite them to come and people were always fascinated because it's a secret society behind the walls. And here was a chance to get an inkling of what a lot of people go through that's hidden from the public. So a lot of people would come to the readings. 

And then I would see the writers and their audience talking with each other. And my students on both sides; my students who had been incarcerated would tell me how surprised they were by anyone being interested in their stories, how gratifying it was, people who they normally felt shunned by, invisibilized or disrespected at best, and policed on or killed at worst. And my wealthier students, they would say, Wow. I had no idea I had anything in common. So it was really good, and the more we can do to create bridges . . . Maybe I'll call this piece bridges. 

I started taking the men’s writing home and would bring it back the next day. They wrote so much that stacks of paper were piling up in their cell areas. Only allowed one rectangular plastic container for their possessions, including books and toiletries, the officers had started telling them they’d have to throw them all out.

A student asked me where I kept their writing.

I said, In my car so I won’t forget to bring it back

He said, What's gonna happen if somebody breaks into your car and steals it? 

He was in for theft. Ironic. 

His assignment the next day was to imagine his writing had been stolen and how he would feel about it. Part two of the story was to imagine he was the random stranger stealing it and how he would feel. Bridges.

Photograph courtesy of Amy Scher 

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Mapmaker won Honorary Mention at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts “Not Just Landscapes” exhibition. Wishing everyone good health!

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