ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
Staring uncarefully at the corners
At the memorial’s candles and flowers
I want to call every time I’ve ever fired a gun a black dahlia
Yellow numbers present inner-city-mountain time
momentum of skin
roosting in firing pins
I deny the united states exists
Did fingers do all of this low-pitch feasting?
Where spitting up a little blood
Is like tasting a little food
And I was forced into the common images of a prison society
Hail, whitey-petit-bourgeois waxing over cornered people
the Madonna now white and male
on the moon
the Madonna now white and male
on the moon
I noticed the legs first
I mean, my home has finally hosted a welcome
An approach to the body
the political brothering of a corpse
mass voicings of copper jackets
refugee tent on the living room tile
Then the unfinished shortenin’ bread on the table
Bent spines rolled into one lovely street being
I sense God now
Yellow aura of the furniture, I’ve controlled the sun for a week
Attica bragging, the color of the cop-killer don’t matter
Return to the torso part of fear or the body temperature of ink
A current for bones
Watch me meditate My daughter reading Marx to my ashes
I sense her tears now
This chapter is pleased and flowering for other worlds
Family is physical law
And every poet belongs in Gaza
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco on May 20, 1980. He received a BA and MA in African American Studies from Columbia University. Eisen-Martin is the author of Blood on the Fog (City Lights Publishers, 2021), which the New York Times’ listed among the Best Poetry of 2021; Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Publishers, 2017), which received the California Book Award and an American Book Award; and Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). A poet, movement worker, and educator, Eisen-Martin’s latest curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the United States. In 2021, Eisen-Martin was appointed the eighth poet laureate of San Francisco. In 2024, he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.