This is not a good year. But it has witnesses.

When you see them protest the powerful, since who else does, they stand like flagpoles outside the courthouse after a northeaster.

They came with the wrong shoes for revolution. Still, they showed up.

Comfort, Lord, their bodies— each a question mark doing time as a coatrack, hung with borrowed jackets.

They are your legion of bent spoons. They are the only ones who showed up— with their orthopedic flair.

I saw my people lean— not toward hope but toward each other. They chant off-rhythm and mean it.

These are my kind of people: no tears—just steam from a kettle that never quite boils.

In times like these, don’t forget us: the lopsided leaning on one another, like sodden paperbacks left out on the stoop— Nobody opens them. But they still insist on carrying the plot.

Comfort us standing up— half scarecrow half saxophone with a squawk. While stiffness becomes state policy, comfort us sitting— in that collapse called calm.

In the year they come for us watch my people make protest signs out of old pizza boxes. Watch—

there are no boring people which is unfortunate. You’d think statistically we’d get at least a few— one-speed souls with just meh stuff to do.

But none of them are dull. Each— a suitcase held together by duct tape.

These are your coffee-stained saints who rise not with trumpets but with Advil. They stand and wait creased like maps of a country that doesn’t exist anymore.