Fiction doesn’t bring about change. Clearly it’s because organizations such as Black Lives Matter, L.A. Community Action Network, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and others being in the streets and testifying at police commission hearings, let alone what’s happening now, has culminated in the Mayor of Los Angeles proposing a $100-$150m cut in the police budget (not a decrease by the way) and redirecting those monies to “jobs, education and healing.”  Fiction can though reflect those changes. It has no choice if it’s to remain relevant and resonate.   ​

In America,
 
You can only be one thing:
One color. One religion. One sex. One body type.
One hair color.
So say the Reality TV actors and producers that
currently run “America”
and have always run “America: The Greatest
Public Relations Campaign in Existence,”
to mask a shadier form of being.
 
America, I would call you the whore of Babylon
except I don’t think you’d even allow a woman
to hold that position of power
in your big swingin pale dick United States of
America.
 
America, did you never think
there would be consequences?
Did the founders pay lip service
to all, when they really meant one type
of America (n)?
Or did they truly mean All?
All skin colors and religions and shapes of feet and
tonsils
Have we just recently fucked it all the way to
oblivion?
Or has it always been so?
Have these United states ever been united?
 
In America we believe in Christianity even though
we don’t believe in the teachings of the blue-eyed
Norwegian whose paintings we hang on our walls.
 
America, you reap what you sow and yet You
continue to sow the same seeds
of
death
and
murder
and
guns
and I
don’t
underst
and it.
 
Go back to your land of potatoes, back to Kenya
where you were born,
Excuse me: you are a brown Muslim woman? A
Congresswoman!
What do you mean guns should have limits?
 
We had never imagined this in America and
because we never imagined it…
We fear it. The women from Minnesota and
Queens most of all.
 
I have lived in America all my life and I still cannot
explain America to you probably because we
cannot agree on a common America.
 
Oh! the boredom, the failings, the trappings, the
poor, the weak, the scared, the limits,
of the white imagination. 

Levi has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University Los Angeles and has a Bachelor of English from the University of Utah. He served on Antioch University’s literary journal, Lunch Ticket, as an associate editor for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction. He runs a coffee roasting company by day and lives in Salt Lake City with his wife Cat, his dog Amelie, and his socks, all of which have holes. ​

1. Shriek. Shriek away, I say. Shriek until McConnell’s ears bleed. Shriek at elevators. Shriek in elevators. Shriek in grocery stores, at school pickup, in your unisex bathroom at work, while walking your dog. Dr. Ford spoke quietly and apologetically. Her tone and presentation made the GOP like her. To them, she seemed nice, a compelling lady. A nice, compelling lady who still cannot go home and whose truth they didn’t care about, not one iota. So, by all means, you lady, or friend of a lady, who is capable of being so much more than likable, shriek.

2. Read. Fortuitously timed with the Kavanaugh fracas, two new books hit the shelves: Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. Both books place women’s rage in a historical context while also drawing on the discourse of the past two years. These women elucidate what you already know viscerally and through experience, but their voices will act as a salve for your pain. Traister and Chemaly remind us we are not alone or crazy. Our rage does not make us hysterical, irrational beings. In fact, our anger can be liberating and empower us.

Malik’s love for Bedouin verse and Arabic translation shines through in much of his work. His poetry about growing up black in South West Philadelphia during the 1970s is devastating and gorgeous. He holds the distinction of being one of the few people who made me cry during an MFA class with a poem about the 1972 MOVE bombing and how he as a child can rationalize the violence happening a few blocks from where he plays. On the converse, his poetry about Negro League Baseball and his relationship with his grandfather forged over a love of the Phillies is equally as powerful, equally as elegant.