Light frays a bruise behind pine fingers curling towards sky,
I want to talk to the future, hear the things it says about itself
and how long ago it spoke to history.
The more bound, the more insatiable my rage.
I start wiping tables with essential, unskilled labor,
working white loops, across formica, worn thin,
soaked in bleach. Patchy diamond pattern, buffed
until barely visible, silver edges catch
overhead halogen, color of warm butter, bubbling.
I’m filling salt shakers. Thoughts rip through indica,
my chest feels tight like Adderall, focus
carries me past six am with trembling hands,
chattering anxiety despite summer’s humid grip,
I am aiding and abetting the job that wants to destroy me.
I remember Bayard Rustin, angelic troublemaker,
concealed, freed, and hidden again.
Cracking riot fires, rust-red as autumn, could turn out a bounty|
into starving, brown-black fingernails on sallow hands
like a slot machine drops into a gambler’s cup.
Under fake red neon and blank-white flatscreens,
noting the need to replenish cream containers,
forgetting and then remembering myself,
stoned dead-end kids with immortal laughs,
an old man collapsing into a gravity well of stale decaf.
Ethel L. Payne said, “Somebody had to do the fighting.”
Naugahyde seats crackle and groan under my knees,
sounds like taking shoes off at the end of the night,
when I remember that the first computer
was a woman named Ada Lovelace
who worked from home, mailing numbers to a Difference Engine
as she wiped snot from her nose.
An overhead light flickers like a stroke,
two cops get free coffee and danishes.
The Fraternal Order of Police once protested
the installation of a Lucy Parsons monument in Wicker Park.
The widow of Haymarket martyrs and the eight-hour-workday,
was once quoted in Medill’s Chicago Tribune:
“Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait in the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.”
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Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 24: Biologie Wayne’s HRT Bootleggers - with quotes by Emory Douglas - mixed media collage and painting on thrift store “painting,” prints, acrylic, marker, graphite, wig hair, coffee, glitter, ink, cotton and ash (2025)
This poem originally appeared in the print edition of Locust Review 12 (2025).