By Anna Lucia Deloia
This year, sidewalk chalk is contraband, and cardboard
must be registered with the dean. The quad is a high-end
neighborhood: nowhere to sleep, nowhere to pee
without a license. Our books and blankets are buried (they’re growing
bunkers underground) but everything that parts the earth is mowed;
still: in your classroom, we are slowly peeling paint
off walls with scotch tape. We are drawing clementines
from a bag, reminding ourselves that everything in
the archive was once alive. We are gumming minutes
and hours under desks, for later—–for when we have
the energy, again, to dance.
Anna Lucia Deloia is a White, queer poet and educator based in Massachusetts, in the U.S. Her work is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Midway Journal, and Paterson Literary Review, and her debut chapbook (‘of god and merriment both’) was published by Bottlecap Press.