Things to Do About Autocrats
Then, unfurl the five fingers and grab a pen—write all the ways you remember sweetness—the sticky gumballs plopping out of machines, bubbles foaming your hair in the bath as a child, your grandmother’s paprika chicken with brown sugar, and keep going because the autocrat thinks what is sweet is your paralysis, your quaking, your head buried under blankets.
Think about power and powerful moments—your first car, its purr or sputtering engine that took you miles from home, opening away from flatlands to crests of mountain ridges. Remember when your father was mad, he went outside and threw balls against the garage wall rather than slapping anyone’s cheek.
Do not forget the bully wants you dully siloed, stretched out in front of a screen, wants you to forget do unto others—the autocrat’s religion is exclusion—hoping to turn back the clock, as if time is retrograde not standing fully present, shoulder to shoulder in a crowd protesting, because being with others strips you of torpor, implores you to reconsider power, as that word implies, observe the stars, once more, together.
Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, was published in 2022 by MoonPath Press. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Her poetry may be found in The Missouri Review (poem of the week), Lily Poetry Review, JAMA, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by vladm, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Suzanne Edison by Ellon Sollod.
