Day 15: RODNEY KOENEKE, THE WORK THEY DO THEY DO AT NIGHT

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The Work They Do They Do At Night

They will come in great happiness

To our distributions of millet.

They will come to the millet and be glad. 

Some are blackened, some stumble, some sing.

They lap at our wine jars, the ewers still warm 

From their hands. I know a hand 

Whose stain crushed the wine

And bathing won’t remove it—

The lancet, the lancet’s begetter

Perv that turns in the bed of the lord he serves

A sweet balm broken, applied to skin

The doctor, the doctor’s assistant

New louts burning holes in the stays. 

I see pluts return from the bad world every day,

Shut fields to plebes and feed them. 

They shouldn’t bother—we pass here for others

Who turn in their sleep on the heather

After taking night’s theater, 

The theater’s owners. Who owns you, 

Purveyors of chaos? Who owns the chorus 

That brings you your tunes? We don’t

Know their names in any of the harbors. 

What keeps them making our boats?

DAY 14: Susana Gardner, TRIUMPH OF LOVE: A FEMINIST RIOT MANIFESTO, or A Pussy Prayer in an Age of Darkness

TRIUMPH OF LOVE: A FEMINIST RIOT MANIFESTO, or A Pussy Prayer in an Age of Darkness
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Day 13: Naomi Buck Palagi, This Time

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DAY 12: MEGAN KAMINSKI, RIOT LOVE POEM

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Riot Love Poem

For Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

A riot    an order    a call in the night to say I love

you and you and you and most especially

the street and open space and our bodies

unbound by restraint and moneyed constriction

and in dreams last night you spoke of fire

of labor and building and soft nests     no armor-clad

SUVs on urban boulevards not oil money not Stoleshnikov Lane    

This morning I exhale across continents breath joined

with yours and ours and wanting more than boundaries

street lamps awakened    petals unfurling    hands opening

burn treasury burn prison burn credit burn churches

burn drones burn austerity burn banks burn office buildings

sing certainty and mass gatherings    totalities

I opened to I into we   

Now we are in Moscow now Perm now Mordovia

Now we are in Paris now Wall Street now Guantanamo

Now Atchison now Waco now Oakland

Now the avenue the bakery the café

Text springing from fingers

Language from mouths

Day 11: Carrie Lorig, Crease Crash

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Day 10: Becca Klaver, LAW OF THE RIOT

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Law of the Riot

The question of the existence of God has become a political question

Since 1845 in New York three or more people can’t wear masks unless they’re coming from a masquerade

In Russia they made the mask law this spring

This is first of all an open civil conflict with an authoritarian regime

In Russia democracy is a newborn baby

It was idiotic choreography in my opinion

But it was not blasphemy

In a sense what was criminal was the intent

This is first of all an open civil conflict

But it was not blasphemy

Some of the words were offensive to the patriarch personally

But it was not blasphemy

They were hitting an invisible enemy with their fists

Democracy is a newborn baby

But it was not blasphemy

All quotes transcribed, and sometimes repeated and reordered, from “Pussy Riot and Protest: The Future of Dissent in Putin’s Russia and Beyond,” a conversation with Pussy Riot’s Russian attorneys, NYU Law School, September 21, 2012.

Day 9: Erin Virgil, Poem for Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich

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Erin Virgil

for Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich

Far away women:

lines lead up to your lives

from the North and East,

places we find unfamiliar.

But your faces speak clearly behind the glass

where you sit poised, like queens. Koponeba.

Far too fine for a circus and a cage.

Cectpbi, they can't hold you much longer