“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a great feeling of love guides a true revolutionary. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”

– Che Guevara, A New Society: Reflections for Today’s World

 

 

The right ventricle

Bleeds with the blood of every

Black man and woman who has been murdered at the hands of the police,

Who has been called a criminal in their own neighborhood.

Who hears a siren and has to wonder if that anxious intake of breath

Will be their last.

 

The pulmonary artery

Bleeds and bursts to fill my weeping lungs

With the blood of thousands of

Missing and murdered indigenous women, 

Who will never come home to their families.

 

The left atrium

Bleeds with the boiling plasma of every woman who has been told

She is worth less because of what she is wearing,

Who is told that she must be silent,

Lest the life of her assaulter is upended

Like hers was.

 

The right atrium, battered,

Bleeds with bricks and broken glass

Hurled at trans women of color

Who were fighting for their right to exist in this world,

By the men we were supposed to trust to “protect and serve.”

 

The left ventricle

Bleeds so much that

The blood runs out of my body

Onto stolen land

Where it will soon rain down with acid

To pollute our dying mother Earth.

 

The aorta

Is a warzone within my chest

Where I bleed out for the genocide of my ancestors

While the blood of colonizers replenishes my veins

To make me forget.

Forget.

Forget.

 

Do not forget.

 

People who try

To stitch my bleeding heart back up

Haphazardly with blunt needles and barbed wire

Will say,

“Don’t worry. If it’s not happening to you,

It’s not happening at all.”

 

What they fail to consider

Is that complacency is complicity,

And that 

Their apathy is my outrage.

 

A bleeding heart

Is not an insult.

It’s a badge of honor.

There is no weakness in having

Human empathy for human rights.

For human lives.

 

And despite your derision,

My heart will keep bleeding itself dry.

And I will let it.

Because maybe

If my heart bleeds hard enough,

My blood will fill the hollow cavity

Where yours is supposed to be.

 

In honor of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Stephan Clark, Philando Castille, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Farrell, Renisha McBride, Jordan Edwards, Jordan Davis, Aiyana Jones, the Charleston 9, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Corey Jones, John Crawford, Terrence Crutcher, Clifford Glover, Claude Reese, Randy Evans, Yvonne Smallwood, Amadou Diallo, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Nia Wilson, and all others who lost their lives because of racist institutions that weaponized the color of their skin.