Resistance

Jason says to write a new poem, but this week at the college we receive a list of words we can no longer say if we want federal funding. On it are women and democracy. We are a Hispanic-Serving Institution that can no longer say the word, Hispanic. As we’re getting our coats and leaving for the day, we see a dead dragon on the carpet, but we just step over it because we’ve forgotten the word, dragon.

We meet at the diner to chronicle our losses, bow our heads over sandwiches and coffee, outline fantastical scenarios in which we’re saved by rogue unicorns or, more likely, well-programmed robots.

At the college, in the nation, the mood is grim. The micro-politics mirror the macro-politics. Or whatever. I don’t care about getting communication right anymore. Phrases aren’t helping anyone right now, and most of them have already been trucked away. We all want to stage a revolution but can’t even find the one working office stapler. We quietly sip margaritas in the break room, search the Internet for affordable vacation options, hallucinate a life in which there are still subjects and verbs.

We wonder what we can use instead of grammar. There must be something more subversive. We see that we will have to get creative. What happens when they take away the words entirely? Poetry, probably.

The king claims he can do whatever he wants to us, but we tell him, no. Then he takes away that word too.

What happens to the letters after they’re hauled off, after we forget how to speak them? Will our tongues mutate, the phrases emigrating to other countries where they can still be said? We plan to write about it but how to do so without language?

The country’s problems come on too speedy and plentiful to conceptualize, each one an explosion, chronicled in endless news cycle. It’s a political tactic to scramble our brains, but the trick is to store them in bird cages until their feathers are glossy again. I don’t want to see all this destruction from my subway window every morning. Sometimes it gets so bad I just take my eyes out to give them a break.

I dig deep into my skin in search of the living-with-ease the meditation app promised me but only locate a disturbing blue slime that my doctor is unable to identify. After the check-up, he provides me with a toll-free number to call, but on the back it says, don’t do it, and when I try anyway nobody answers. I listen to the sound of ringing for hours, searching for some code to airlift us out of here.

I was promised something different when I signed up for America. What happened here? There’s just bombed-out buildings and more blue slime, but not the kind my kids love to play with. The kids. What of them? How to aim them towards a planet they can survive on when all this microwaves itself?

Then one morning, I’m startled in the hall by my Xeroxed copy, who is way more compliant than I am, which is why everybody loves her, especially the king. My copy dances for him on top of all the bodies long after the streetlights have gone out, while I surf the nation’s subway tunnels in search of the antidote. I must work fast because they’re coming for me. If you find this, send help.

We are still teachers but where’s the knowledge? Robots write our students’ term papers, or our students have turned into robots, we forget. What in the corporate vault is safe to feed anybody? We must find something true to deposit in their heads, but the truth has been outlawed, so we take lies and turn them inside out for our pupils.

This has been a month in which language was tested. Inside me when I reach for ideas, I often find silence. But this is a simplistic way of understanding my own inner ecology, so I set words aside and go voyaging deep into the interior lushness. I blow up the compass, ask nothing of those beings already there, wander bare through the unknowable, until I find something roaring at its center, and pet it until it falls asleep. When it awakes it wants to tell me something, not in words, so I lean in close to try to absorb this abundance of light, something about safety.

The next day I take over the factory and start manufacturing new stanzas to talk about the war.

I connect radio wires to the moon to make sayings that can’t be decrypted but you understand them somewhere inside. I camouflage them as creeping vines so that they’re able to infiltrate the Citadel.

In the tunnels, I zoom through pixelated corridors of what I’d once thought my country to be, try to liberate all the forbidden words, unleash them on the tongueless public, watch as they learn to speak again.

I leave with an understanding of what I need to do: scrawl the letters of a new language on my body until it becomes something you can read about freedom.

Here’s what the witch tells me when I find her at last inside the Citadel. She says the thing I thought at the bowling alley that made all the pins fall: We must resist.