By Lola
We went to chinatown to watch the lunar new year parade. The streets were packed and we had to park 10 blocks away, up on a steep hill in north beach. I remember walking towards the fireworks, slowing down every two minutes as i waited for you to tag a trashcan, full moon hanging low over criss-crossing streets. We found the rest of the group in huntington park, drinking and skating the stoop of grace cathedral. Something felt sad and lost. I told you i was going to go find the parade. This was 2024, the year of the dragon. We ended up back in oakland that night, at the ave, and although no one seems to remember that, or the parade itself, to me it was unforgettable. A foray into my year of wishing and wanting. We lit christmas tree fires in the street all through that winter, and fire was all i could see — all that I was betting on. I didn’t have a strategy. I just knew I was angry and in love. I just wanted to get closer to the heat.
Around me, like hot wax, the world moves, drips, pools, morphs. Gray whales and monarch butterflies begin their migration journeys north. Palestinian resistance fighters push the IOF off of their land, and march homeward. Seasons twist, winter arrives, you give me a knife for my birthday. I keep it in my purse. An email on how to protect our students from ICE is circulated through the school that i work at. And as I walk in spirals from the first full moon of the year to the last, it seems like the dragon has spoken her message loud and clear: all movement hinges on its proximity to the open flame. I find myself tucking into corners where the wax is hottest, the most malleable. I initiate fights that i don’t have the skills to win, i love people who i’m pretty sure will not love me back. And it feels good, for a while. This chasing, wishing, praying.
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My sister told me that the earth recognizes three different kinds of blood. The blood of life (blood from childbirth), the blood of transformation (period blood) and the blood of death. Because reproductive health is in crisis — our natural cycles are no longer honored and revered and birth has been co-opted by patriarchal western medicine — the only blood that the earth is receiving now is the blood of death. In many ways we have tricked the earth and ourselves into believing that we have arrived at the end; that we are all dying. There is always death in the news, and there is always the death that the news will never report. The president announces he will level Gaza out and turn it into a strip mall. Some people — especially liberals, eager to blame anything and anyone other than empire itself — are very scared now. For others, this is nothing new. More threats and intimidation. The violence will continue, as it has continued for a long time, and the resistance will continue alongside it. (Trump is never going to “own” Gaza; as Subhi put it, “The west is so lost in their tiny little world that they are incapable of realizing not everybody in the world values what white westerners value… Many Palestinian muslims would rather sacrifice their lives, their bodies in this world, than to be pushed out of their land — hand over their holy land to the enemy.”)
On tuesdays, grand lake theatre shows old movies for $5, and we decided to go see the wizard of oz. I had this crazy creepy feeling the whole time we were in there, watching this film that by someone’s colonial, 20th century american standards, was supposed to be a simple allegory for good and evil. A clueless white girl shows up in someone else’s country, kills the witch who lives there and steals her magical shoes, consequently pissing off the witch’s sister; she then makes friends with a bunch of infantile older men who help her kill the witch’s sister and promptly head back home, taking the shoes with her. It occurred to me, as I watched this wild series of events go down, that a mainstream american film from the 1900s is not different at all from a movie that might have been produced in nazi germany. We have a long history of comparing the atrocities of the US government to other, infamously “evil” states. We draw on north korea, russia, germany, iraq… stating that contemporary displacement, genocide, and oppression caused by the US is “almost as bad” as the foreign dictatorships of the past. But we don’t need to travel so many miles away, so many years back to make sense of where we are today. We don’t need to analyze foreign military structures, propaganda films, or government policies to understand how oppression works. Because it’s all right here at our own doorstep. There is nothing more American than genocide.
It can be a twisted existence. Knowing where we are, and how we got here. Maintaining that awareness everyday. How much blood is there, under the paved streets? Under the grass on their front lawns, under the high rises and bridges? Under the sand on the beach? Blood of death, blood of life, blood of transformation. The history of this place is a history of enslavement, exploitation. Displacement and starvation and control. But that’s just one way to look at it. Because of course, a good amount of the blood that has long-since soaked into the earth belonged to the cops and presidents. And depending on which way you wanna see it, the history of this place is also a history of resistance.
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The lunar new year, like the wiccan holiday Imbolc, celebrates the half-way point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is the turning point between winter and spring, a tentative light pin-pricking the darkness. In the weeks that border two different seasons, it always feels like the membrane between past and present is thinning, perforating. The last time i could feel the seasons shifting like this, perceptibly, breathlessly, it was sometime in october. The clouds high and dark and tinged with orange, the once-lost feelings swimming tentatively to the surface. I was teaching middle school at the time, seventh grade english. I remember the first rain of the year, during second period. A drizzle against the big west-facing windows of classroom 204. The brief moment between summer and fall, just like the one between winter and spring, always makes me feel hopeful, nostalgic. Like the first leaf that shrivels, turns red, falls from the branch to the street: there is both the sense of knowing and not knowing what will come next, the urge as well as the reluctance to remember that the branch will become bare, the rain will fall, the neighbors will frame their door in christmas lights. Most of the time these days, i’m all caught up in my emotions. Lost in my own ups and downs. It is easy to forget that all of the change — the
up only to cool down, the anger and hardness that gives way to soft vulnerability, is all part of the natural swing of things. Remembered or forgotten, weaving between apocalypses and dandelion seedlings, the repetition and balance of our world is ceaseless.
Lyrics from the band Drugdealer have been stuck in my head since high school. Wild motion running through your life…helps you to ease your mind, be still sometimes. I don’t know exactly what they were attempting to say there, but i’ve always felt a lucid sense of direction in those intervals between structure, steadiness, and sterility. Momentum follows heat and renewal arrives alongside ash. The state of the world is terrifying, and it isn’t an interlude. Maybe it has always been this way, always will be this way. If the end times are here, maybe they have been here since the first ice age. Maybe they have been here since the day the ice began to melt back into the sea. That burning desire for revolution is ingrained within us — we mirror the planet we call home. Irrational, incendiary, flooded in moonlight. But as assata shakur said, revolution must be scientific, not just emotional. We can’t afford to get lost in the heat now, bugs smashing dully against the street lamps, sand crabs crawling straight into the driftwood fire, punches thrown clumsily on the sidewalk, swinging and missing and swinging and missing and swinging again —
In a couple weeks, the lunar new year parade will wind through the streets of chinatown. I’ll probably be there to see it, leaning against a windowsill with my tall can, watching the fireworks that they’ve aimed at the moon, that same full moon. But a year older, now. 2025 is the year of the snake. Similar to the dragon, but smaller, stealthier. Still deadly, but with no fire in its lungs. I imagine this snake slithering quietly through the rubble of the past year, observing, assessing, plotting. In filipino mythology, serpents would sometimes follow warriors into battle, indicating that one’s ancestors were on their side. Whether we wanted this or not, the world has begun to burn. I don’t think thats going to end anytime soon — i don’t think things are going to start calming down. I’m pretty sure we’re headed for more chaos. More battles. It’s a beautiful instinct, to follow the heat. But i don’t want to follow it blindly. Whether or not we remember the balance of life, the pendulum will continue to swing. From light to dark, side to side, quiet to loud — from firing guns to writing poems — its time for us to collect ourselves, now. Organize. Militarize. Lock in. Your wishes and prayers have always been more than scraps of paper to be set aflame, sent off into the wind — they are the venom in your fangs. Remind yourself, and bare them.