ABOLITION
JOURNAL


EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE

  1. Editors’ Notes: On Direction & On Poetry | Christopher R. Rogers and Gabriel Ramirez
  2. Abolition is a Brick: On the Origins of the Du Bois Movement School | Geo Maher
  3. The High School Lunch Table Reimagined | David A. Gaines
  4. Relearning the Language of Care | Alexandrea Henry
  5. Tossed About the Room | Tongo Eisen-Martin
  6. From Abolition School to Palestine | Farwa Zaidi in convo w/ Nneka Azuka & Talia Charidah
  7. Movement Moments: PAO Rally Speech | Nneka A.
  8. protest | Raina J. León
  9. The Kids | Alyesha Wise
  10. All (Purchasing) Power to the People | Saskia Kercy
  11. (communique #1) | S. R. Lalo
  12. From Intention to Liberation | Abbas Naqvi
  13. Standardized Test | Taylor Alyson Lewis
  14. The New Republic of Kindergarten | Hiwot Adilow
  15. Lost Lady. Found Niece. | Kiian Dawn
  16. Holding the Jagged Edges | Shantell Missouri
  17. Prison Radio Suite x Abolition Journal |  Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, KnowledgeBorn GodAllah, Krystal Clark, & Spoon Jackson
  18. “Ultimately, What Any of Us Want is Structural Change” | No Arena in Chinatown x Abolition Journal Roundtable
  19. Healing “Body & Soul” | Jake Sonnenberg of Healthcare Workers for Abolition
  20. Abolition Starts at Home | frenchy, Han & zara of the The Philly Childcare Collective
  21. Maximizing Study & Struggle between Haiti and Philadelphia | Talie Cerin & James Beltis x Woy Magazine
  22. Migrant Justice, Border Abolition & The Resistance of Now | Sterling K. Johnson in convo w/ Viktoria Zerda
  23. Movement Life-in-the-Along & the Grand (Re)Vision of Abolition Journal | Christopher R. Rogers



TOSSED ABOUT THE ROOM | TONGO EISEN-MARTIN


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

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.