For court watchers, signal. For ICE watchers, salute.
My impatience as the cryptopad doc reconstitutes itself.
Wherein walking next to someone in public constitutes obstruction,
Invites arrest. I try to read
Between the lines of the statistics. My neighbors plead:
We especially need white-presenting folks.
I review my chances of detention, of doxxing.
Could I, as a friend fears, become de-naturalized?
As if I had been artifice, & after five years here, became flesh–
Or, eyeing my old greencard status,
A sudden opposite of alien—a resident earthling, a resident familiar.
My adjunct colleagues and students are fired. Scratch that.
They receive, quote unquote, letters declining reappointments.
Officially, the admin can’t share why. Unofficially,
For the professors linked their arms. In public. Bearing witness,
Like tiny fishing boats in the front of a whaling ship. As in,
Adorned by rusting metal and a freshly painted crosswalk, as in,
Bureaucratically. Counting on the dead of summer,
On stifling, on wilting. Counting the living. The heat guarantees no light.
If they override all protocols, evaluations, scores, documents,
Each faculty letter, student protest, departmental vote, union grievance. Then
What—My colleagues' charges remain unknown.
A summer of reading subtexts. In theory, I classify
Fictions by genre: speculative, satire, fantasy, mystery, tragedy.
This poem was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Celina Su’s academic and creative work focuses on everyday struggles for collective governance. Her latest projects are her new book centering radical democracy, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities, and her poetry collection Landia. This poem was inspired in part by the case of the CUNY Fired Four, involving four professors who were fired from Brooklyn College for supporting Palestine. They are on Instagram at @reinstatecunyfiredfour.
