with a line from Fatimah Asghar
These are my people and I find
them in cubicles in NW Washington DC
hunched over computers, their bodies
a question mark asking
Am I Making a Difference?
my people, my conclave, I shall
print your nametag with a lavalier
so they shall know you, dear policy
associate dressed in a navy Ann Taylor
shift dress you discreetly tug down.
You are mine, left-wing economist, leaving
my room 8 a.m. on a Saturday to sit at a cafe
writing a blog you believe will convince
the World Bank to care more for the world
than for the bank. I see you, nonprofit
leader, your hands hold a rainbow
of markers as you write the ways
we should correct all these wrongs. I take
a thousand sticky notes, colors of
soft spring and write, I love you,
plaster them like a prayer over the tear
sheets outlining our vision for another
world (is possible). You, feminist
activist in sensible shoes, tackling
the cost of women’s care–invisible,
uncounted, unpaid. Forget
equations for a moment: it’s never going
to be enough. But, you, my people, sitting
in coalition meetings in fair trade t-shirts,
drinking from coffee cups you got
for free at last year’s conference, I sing you
a song of persuasion, my throat aflutter
with your metrics and dashboards, all
the ways you contort your body to bend
that arc (our ark).
I send you silver paper clips
for analog times,
claim even the older white man
in short-sleeves and a tie who
works in development and does
not believe that women’s voices
carry, but loves Kenya’s thorn
acacia trees. His life’s work
coaxing a forest from seed. And when they
fire one of us, they fire us all.
Together, we’ll set the world ablaze.
Marceline White is a Baltimore-based writer and activist whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, The Ekphrastic Review, trampset, yolk, Prime Number, The Orchard Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, and others. She has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Key West Literary Seminar, and an AWP Writer-to-Writer mentorship. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and three times for Best of the Net, when not writing, Marceline can be found serving her two cats and telling her son to text her when he arrives at the EDM show. Read more at www.marcelinewhitewrites.com.
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