First 100 Days: We the People Who March
By Yun Wei
We walk because that is all to be done
all our bodies can do
when so much has been done to us.
We walk because it’s not done: the work
of hands pressed against stone
and monuments, the work that hands must do
when there are no more parts
to assemble, just an endless sorting
of hows and whys, punctuation marks
that can’t contain the content,
as if brackets could stand for windows,
as if a parenthesis could pronounce justice,
inclusive, resistance – all the words
we need in stone. (No need to pull down
the monuments: these were already written)
We walk because gravity is sliding past,
because backwards is not a road,
and when the pavement slides too,
and the lampposts and stop lights,
the freeways and ways to freedom,
we will find a rise in morning light
that casts lines as wide as roads
because rising is all our bodies can do
when there is so much to be done,
so much to make bright.
Yun Wei received her MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College and a Bachelor’s in International Relations from Georgetown University. Her writing awards include the Geneva Literary Prizes for Fiction and Poetry and the Himan Brown Poetry Fellowship. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in decomP Magazine, Roanoke Review, Apt Magazine, Word Riot, The Brooklyn Review and other journals. For the last few years, she was working on global health in Switzerland, where she consistently failed at mountain sports.