Category Archives: immigrants

Why I Write 30 Poems in November

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In 2020, I stood at the Brownsville, Texas airport on Valentine’s Day watching shackled people hobble up the runway of this plane. And every day in 2026, all over the country, people are being arrested, detained, and deported without due process and often to countries where their lives are in danger. Even where I live in Massachusetts, where many towns and cities have passed sanctuary and other protective laws and resolutions, and where the state has recently passed legislation limiting ICE activities in courts, schools, and health care facilities, no one is truly safe.

 

So, in addition to spending significant time as an activist and advocate for immigrants, I have pledged each November to write 30 poems to support the Center for New Americans, an organization that provides English classes, legal advocacy, and countless other kinds of assistance to immigrants in our community.

Writing 30 poems in a month isn’t easy, and every October as I think about signing up again, a part of me panics at the thought of having one more thing to accomplish on my daily to-do list, even if there’s no pressure for all of the poems to be good–or even finished. But I do this anyway as a way of speaking out against the horrendous unleashing of ICE in our communities, and their blatant disregard for human life as they separate children from parents; arrest and detain American citizens, green card holders, and immigrants with legal status as well as those who lack documentation; and recklessly break into people’s homes, shoot people in cars, and murder Americans who have shone up to witness in peaceful protest.

It is a f-ing scary world we’re living in right now. And while we can be hopeful for the midterms, history has shown us that we can’t depend on Democrats to take care of things if they do attain majorities. We need to keep speaking up and speaking out. For a list of easy actions, Massachusetts residents can check out this link from DeICEhanscom.org. And people throughout the country can sign up at https://www.de-iceaction.org/ for one quick action to be delivered to your inbox each week.

Also, we can donate to some of the many immigration support networks that are out there. I’d be totally honored if you’d like to include the Center for New Americans on your list by donating to my fundraising page, here. In appreciation, I promise to send you my 30 poems at the end of the month. And I also promise that you are under no obligation to read them. Life is short and time is precious.

I do need to be honest and say that this is not a totally selfless mission. As a writer, I’ve gotten great benefit out of past 30 Poems in November efforts–and even a few good poems in the process. The obligation to face the blank page every day is helpful, even if words don’t always flow as smoothly as I might like them to. And coming together several times a month by attending workshops and readings with other community writers who are involved in this effort has been incredibly nurturing, because, utlimately, community feels like the only thing that will save us–and save those most vulnerable around us.

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Statue of Liberty

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Photo by D. Dina Friedman

Back in the 1980s when I was working as a VISTA volunteer in Brooklyn and had very little money for entertainment, the Staten Island Ferry was one of the best bargains and a most pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon. You could ride back and forth as much as you wanted back then. Now, you have to get off the boat and get back on, but the ride is free (in the 1980s it was a quarter.) If you don’t want to pay a lot of money or deal with the crowds at Liberty Island, the ferry can give you a pretty darn good view of the Statue of Liberty, which still stirs something in me–maybe even more so in these turbulent times. So, I was excited to ride the ferry again on my way to visit friends in Staten Island when I was in NYC last weekend.

Once again, as we passed through the harbor, I thought about my own history with the Statue of Liberty, which I wrote about shortly after going to the refugee camp on the Mexican border in 2020. Here’s the piece. It was originally published in Prose Online in 2023 (You can hear me reading it, here) and then republished in my chapbook, Here in Sanctuary Whirling.

 

STATUE OF LIBERTY

I.

You can’t really forget a green statue, because when you’re a kid you know that statues are not supposed to be Comet-vomit-green. We took a boat. I was little, maybe four or five, and I couldn’t see over other people’s heads. We might have gone into the statue, but maybe we didn’t because the line was too long and my mother hates waiting in lines. My mother told me you used to be able to go all the way to the torch, but they closed that part off because someone fell, or maybe they jumped. I looked up at the torch and felt cheated. That’s the only part I remember.

II.

I took my boyfriend here when I was in college. He was from suburban Illinois, a land of tall, white, blond people. It was a windy day in January, so there was hardly anyone on the boat. We couldn’t go into the statue because it was closed for renovations. Or maybe we went in and walked up all those stairs to look out the crown’s windows to the harbor, and beyond it, to the open sea. To tell the truth, I don’t remember. To tell the truth, I couldn’t see over his head.

III.

I broke up with my boyfriend because he was blond. That’s the simplified version, though perhaps I broke up with him because he was from not-New York, or because the Statue of Liberty was closed the day we made the trip, or because the statue was open. I broke up with my best friend several years earlier when I was still in high school. She was the Chinese daughter of immigrants. We were on the subway. She was reading Ayn Rand. I told her I was a socialist and she stopped talking to me. Her stop came first. She got off the train and I watched the closing doors.

IV.

I never thought I could leave New York, but I did. That break-up was harder than leaving my blond boyfriend and harder than the day my best friend stopped talking to me. Now I’m living on a farm with tall, blond people and a lot of cows. The cows have the illusion of freedom in the pasture until they graze by the electric fence.

V.

There have been many cartoons of the Statue of Liberty being compromised. There was one where she had a For Sale sign hung around her neck. There was another with the former president, the one who hated immigrants, ripping off her head and holding it as a trophy. Before he was elected, they put a statue of this president in Union Square. He was naked with diaper rash and a sagging pot belly. The statue wasn’t green, but maybe it should have been.

VI.

I think I went once with my kids to the Statue of Liberty, but they were bored and we didn’t go inside. Or maybe we did go inside and they were bored. Or maybe we just went to Ellis Island, where I remember with certainty that they were bored, even when we found the plaques my parents paid for, which had the names of my great-great-grandparents, who came to the Statue of Liberty on crowded boats where they couldn’t see over people’s heads. It’s hard, sometimes, to raise kids in a land of blond people with too many cows.

VII.

My great-great grandmother came here to escape the pogroms. My great grandmother told me her mother said that whenever the Cossacks came to the door, she would make the sign of the cross and say “Christians Live Here,” or maybe my grandmother told me that story about her grandmother. I don’t remember. What I do remember is they both said the Old Country was very bad. Other people I went to school with were children of Holocaust survivors. We played a game in the schoolyard called Concentration Camp. It was kind of like tag, except the “it” person was the Nazi, and if they caught you, they made you do unspeakable second-grade things. In school we sang, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and “God Bless America.” One year we did an assembly program called “Sing, America, Sing.” I wrote a satire called, “Cry, America, Cry.” Even then I had the leanings of a socialist.

IX.

I have recently returned from the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, where there is no Statue of Liberty. Instead, there’s a tall guard at the bridge who won’t let anyone put a foot in the country to claim asylum, or see over his head. A man in the camp tells me of intruders coming to his house with guns. He tells me about being shoved into a car with his eight-year-old daughter by kidnappers demanding ransom. He tells me about being taken by immigration authorities and locked in a cold, windowless room. At least, the statue still has windows. I did climb it at least once. I remember clearly, the day I looked out through the dirty glass.

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Superstition

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I have a designated airplane outfit, which I need to wear each time I fly so the plane doesn’t crash. And the minute I get on the plane, I have to do a complicated 4 x 4 sudoku puzzle and not pay attention to anything else until we reach 10,000 feet, even though I’m not particularly afraid of flying. Nor would I call myself superstitious, other than carrying the inherited “wisdom” of my Jewish ancestors: Don’t make up lies about bad things; otherwise they will happen. For instance don’t say you can’t do something because your grandmother is sick, and—God forbid—don’t say you missed class because your grandmother died, because then she will.

But despite positioning myself clearly in the quadrant of “not superstitious,” it’s still a long road between there and the end of the axis: trusting that the universe will take care of you.

A few days ago, in Burlington, Mass., a six-year-old girl was on her way to her kindergarten graduation. ICE grabbed him out of his car, and brought the two of them to the holding site where my friend was one of several hundred people who show up several days a week to witness. She watched as the little girl came out alone with an ICE agent, crying and screaming, Mami! Papi!

What superstition could this man have adopted to prevent ICE from ripping him away from his family and severing his dreams? If he ends up on the fast track for deportation, which, thanks to two Trump-appointed judges on the DC Circuit Court, was reinstated after being blocked by lower courts, what shirt should he wear to keep the plane from crashing?

Congressman Jim McGovern visits the ICE holding facility in Burlington, MA. Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And the little girl: What inheritance will she carry from her Papi, locked in a crowded room never meant to be a jail, with no showers, one exposed toilet, and no food except what can be bought bulk from Amazon and put in the microwave. Will this girl ever attend another graduation without thinking of this day? What was she wearing? A pink dress? Or overalls—taking the first necessary step we all must take to buck the little girl princess stereotype? What will she carry in the deepest cavities of her heart—an inheritance that will be hers forever? Will she remember the shadow face of the agent who ignored her screams and smirked as he handed her off to a neighbor to bring her back to her mother and baby sister? Will she remember the faraway voice of her Papi in a distant land? How carefully will she choose her clothes to keep her mother safe? Will she trust in a divine benevolence as so many of the people I met at the border did, despite the rapes, the gangs, the loss of loved ones?

Can superstition save us? Any of us? All of us?

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Limbo

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I think my mother nailed it when she said on Tuesday, “4 PM: Mets; 7 PM: Yankees; 8 PM: end of civilization.”

Luckily we seem to have sidestepped that disaster–for now, but it does give pause to think about how fragile the trajectories of our lives can be, how we’re living in a perpetual state of limbo.

This feels true for me on on a personal level, as well. There’s no more fighting the notion that I’ve entered the senior citizen demographic, where obstacles to the body’s ability to maintain optimal function (all the risk factors and things one has to worry about) have seemed to increase exponentially. I’ve emerged relatively unscathed, so far, but many of my friends have had far more serious challenges than I have maintaining their health, mobility, and in some cases, their lives.

As I address my own (relatively minor) challenges of aging with a frenzied oscillation between fretfulness over the inevitable and a can-do attitude on how much weight I can dead-lift to improve my bone density, bigger questions continue to loom on the horizon, especially in these tumultuous times. How long do any of us–even those nowhere near the age for decline–have to lead full and happy lives?

And no matter what their age, how many people’s lives are unfairly upended by loss of a loved one through war or other unnecessary acts of destruction?

Finally, what’s been at the forefront of my mind: how many people’s lives have been compromised through personal harm and separation from their families due to our country’s cruel and inhumane detention policies?

Yesterday, I traveled two hours with a friend to the ICE office in Burlington, MA, which is also being used as a detention center, despite not having adequate facilities–i.e. no showers, minimal food, and one exposed toilet for 40 people captured by video camera. We had just learned that our Congressman, Jim McGovern, whom we’d been urging during a recent meeting, was planning to make an unannounced oversight visit. All previous Congressional visits to Burlington have been pre-arranged, giving ICE time to clean up their act (with one unannounced Congressperson turned away at the door), but a recent court order reaffirmed the right of Congress to conduct oversight inspections without needing to make advance plans.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

This time, they did let McGovern in. He confirmed that what he saw was a jail. He also had the opportunity to speak to a young man from Honduras–not “the worst of the worst” but someone who had a job, paid taxes, and had no criminal record and an asylum claim in process. This man has now been separated from his wife and two children–ages 12 and 7, with his future in limbo. McGovern’s visit is covered in this short news story. His recount of his observations to the people attending the weekly Wednesday witness in Burlington is here.

I know this post has gone a long way from annihilation, to aging, to bearing witness, but in all these cases, limbo stays with us, setting us on edge. Being alive right now feels a little like being on the balance board my grandson has. No matter how firmly my feet feel grounded, there’s always that possibility of sudden toppling. And I can only imagine what it’s like for those in the direct “line of fire”: people in war zones, people being targeted by ICE. How to wake up each day and just hope that you can go about your life and things will turn out okay? In the meantime, as long as my aging body holds up, I’m determined to do what I can to not only improve my chances of living well, but those of others, too.

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My Little Life

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Yesterday, catching-up on the phone with a friend, I said in response to our mutual lament on the state of the world, I just keep doing my piece of the work, along with the rest of my little life.

My little life! echoed the depressed, despairing child that lives inside of me. It’s one of the things that keeps me up at night when the inner critics are jazzed on caffeine and partying away. Why should anything in your little life matter and why aren’t you doing enough to stop the tidal wave of horror that’s sweeping over everything around you? 

It gets to the point where I can’t read the news stories any more, like this one where ICE tricked a father with no criminal record and arrested him when he went to ICE to reunite with his children. Or the emails from friends in the community about people they know personally–caregivers, neighbors, friends being kidnapped and sent to Texas or Louisiana with no hope of bail. Not to mention the horror of a new war. And the constant twisting of language into an unrelenting spewed and venomous hatred of any one who is “other” in any way, shape, or form.

But enough ranting. What is “my little life,” anyway? Is it enough?

Here’s a snapshot:

Wake up. Open the shade and consider the sky. Sunny or cloudy? Spend a moment taking in the potential of the day. Center on the long reach of the naked trees. They’re still here, so you can be, too. Sit somewhere you can look out the window at the tree, and do your 5 minutes of breathing practice. Turn on the phone and play a 10 minute meditation tape. Do NOT open email or social media until you’ve done this. Then, quickly scan your email, but only for 5 minutes max. Go downstairs, where your partner is waiting, for 30 minutes of exercise: cardio, yoga, or strength-training. Segue into breakfast. Take your vitamins.

Finally, get to your computer with a large cup of tea. Consider the choices spread before you if you’re lucky enough to have a morning with no appointments. Generate new writing, revise writing, send out writing, work through the never-ending pile of house/admin; and all the activist tasks–emails, articles and letters to read or write, writing from others to edit, phone calls. Ask yourself two questions: which option calls the most right now, and which option is most urgent? You may get two different answers. You may get seven different answers, but try to make a choice. Try, despite your dopamine-craving brain to focus on whatever choice you made. Try NOT to stop what you’re doing to check your email and read more horror stories (a.k.a news).

If you do have appointments. Sit by your computer and talk to the people in the Zoom squares. Admire people’s writing. Chew on nuances in political strategy. Volunteer for more than you think you can do easily, and get overwhelmed. Or know this is your tendency, and only volunteer for half of what draws you.

Interrupt writing blog post for urgent phone call about flyer for Street Theatre Presentation at No Kings Day in Easthampton and Amherst that needs to be sent to the printer this morning. Interruption for all of you: Please go to a No Kings Day protest this Saturday, March 28th!! And bring a friend, or three!

Eventually it will be lunch time. After lunch, try to set aside time for a walk in the woods. Visit your favorite tree. Try to do this even if it’s cloudy, or nasty. If it’s really nasty, go to the Y. Or go to the Y anyway if you’re going into town to run errands, or see a friend, or if you’re on your way home from taking care of your grandson.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

Take care of your grandson as often as you can. Jump fully into the world of a three-year-old who knows nothing about wars. Don’t think about the three-year-olds in detention. Don’t think about the three-year-olds whose parents are in detention. Don’t think about the three-year-olds who were killed in the wars in Gaza or in Iran, or the ones whose parents are dead.

When it’s your turn to cook dinner, spend mindful time preparing a nourishing meal. After dinner, call your 92-year-old mother and listen to the details of her day. Study Spanish, then practice piano or do your voice/yoga exercises and sing your heart out with karaoke tracks on you-tube. Chat with a friend. Watch a show. Do the crossword puzzle together with your partner or curl up with a book. Give your brain a rest from its obligations. Take a hot, relaxing shower and try to turn off the light before midnight. Try to sleep at least 7 hours. 8 is better, though it will skew your day so that you’ll feel behind as soon as you wake up.

Rinse. Repeat. And remember, spring is coming, so, soon, it will be all this, plus gardening.

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When Do Stories End

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Every time I ask my 3-year old grandson, Manu, “Do you want to hear a story?” he stops what he’s doing and fixes his gaze on me, his eyes wide in anticipation, shooting me a little dose of performance pressure. But I don’t have to worry because if he doesn’t like the story, he intervenes to change it. He has a strong preference for the characters to be people he knows, so I can’t resort to folk or fairy tales unless he, or my cat, or the members of the Tokyo Paradise City Ska Band make an appearance and take over the action. Even then, he likes to interrupt and add salient or deliberately funny details on his own, so that the story quickly becomes a joint effort.

But sooner or later, we both run out of gas, as we did about a week ago, when I said, “That’s the end of the story.”

“Why?” I could tell from his tone that he was clearly upset.

“Because I don’t know what comes next. Do you?”

Manu followed up with a sentence or two, and then looked at me to continue. I added what I hoped was a closing sentence, and then asked him if he knew what happened next, He said he didn’t.

“Neither do I,” I told him. “So that’s the end.”

A couple of days later in one of my writing groups, a fellow writer lamented the elusiveness of plot. “I have so many words, but not plot” she said. And without a plot, how do we manage our words? How do we translate that hidden precious bud of whatever we’re trying to express while still making it conform to the parameters of fiction that people expect: plot, being an essential element.

Even though I’ve been told by many teachers that my first published book–a YA Holocaust novel, Escaping Into the Night–was so well-plotted that “even the boys who preferred more action-oriented books liked it,” I’ve never considered myself a master at plot. There are many fiction-writing books that can teach you how to map out your plot in advance, designating turning points one-third, two-thirds, and just before the end that raise the stakes–a common outline for Hollywood movies. This is probably a good exercise to do, though I’ve never done it. Whatever plots I’ve managed to nudge out of my writing have emerged out of deep attention to character and setting, and intensive pondering of what could possibly happen next.

Often I go through several periods of trial and error before settling on what feels both realistic and meaningful in terms of getting across whatever underlying theme I’m struggling with. It’s not that different from riffing with Manu on my cat’s adventures in the backyard, except that instead of abandoning plot points that don’t work, we just keep going on one wacky tangent after another.

Lately in my own writing, I’m coming across another issue in plotting and determining where stories end. Even though I’ve already written and published a book of short stories on immigrants, the issue keeps tugging at both my activist and creative heart. But in the new fiction projects I’ve started on the topic (a couple of short stories and a YA novel) I keep getting to the point where every answer I can imagine to “what happens next” is so horrible, I can’t even write it down.

Maybe, I just need to follow Manu’s example when it comes to the issue of ending stories, and just refuse to say, that’s the end. At least, not until I can see past these awful moments into a brighter and more hopeful future.

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Washing Away the Numbness

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Like most writers, I’m constantly trying to strike the perfect balance between time for my writing and time for the rest of my life. And, like many activists, I struggle to balance responding to the demands of a situation, while setting boundaries so I can stay focused and not burn out too quickly. This past week has certainly been a test in maintaining all these balances. Nearly every day I’ve had 2 or 3 long meetings, some of them highly frustrating in the amount of disappointing new information revealed, or in their lack of productive outcomes.

This doesn’t even include time dealing with the text threads and email chains to plan and debrief these meetings, and sorting through the hundreds of issue-related texts and emails that have come into my inbox–many of which need to be responded to or forwarded to the right people.

Nor does it include the demonstration a few of us planned last Saturday as part of a regional day of action to boycott Citizens Bank, one of the few banks that still provides loans to CoreCivic and GeoGroup, two major players that run most of the ICE detention centers. And it doesn’t include the insomniac hours I spent worrying about the zero-degree wind chill forecast for that day and pondering whether or not we should postpone. (We decided to go for it, but set a shorter time frame. Happy that we got a good turnout and the sun kept the cold tolerable.)

It also doesn’t include dealing with the numbing grief as one shocking news story after another unfolds in Minneapolis and elsewhere. A second murder of a protester, the abduction of a preschooler used as bait to detain his parents (my grandson has the same bunny hat), a gunpoint wrongful arrest of a US citizen who was taken in his underwear in the frigid cold, and 5-year old twins being denied release after 8 months in detention in Texas because the judge said they have no access to collateral.

These are just a few of the horrific stories that can easily send me reeling into a state of numbness.

While people now seem to be galvanized by DHS’s murders of Tim Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, it’s important to know that they are only 2 of the 8 people who died in dealings with ICE just in the past month. Perhaps it’s easier to see ourselves in Pretti and Good, since they were protesters, but let’s not forget the other six people who died in ICE detention centers this January, often under questionable circumstances: Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Campos’s case is particularly disturbing, as ICE claimed he committed suicide, but the medical examiner determined that his death was clearly a homicide.

So, yes, friends, it has been hard to find balance. And hard to find the psychic space to write, though in some ways being inundated with all these meetings and emails and events and projects does make me feel like I’m doing something to fight the tsunami, even if at times, I worry that I’m just wading right into it with my surfboard. Still, the cold water pouring over me does help wash away the numbness. And somehow, I’m still managing to stay afloat. And if you’re moved to take a small but important action right now, you can ask your Senator to vote against continued funding for ICE, using this call script from Indivisible.

Image by Elias from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/wave-ocean-sea-storm-tsunami-1913559/

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Grandma, Dance!

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Once again, I was in the middle of preparing a blog post on my submissions stats from 2025. And once again, life happened. Or, should I say, death happened.

Renee Nicole Good. 37 years old. A poet, and the mother of three young children.  Sitting in her car as a legal observer during an ICE raid in Minneapolis. Shot four times in the face after being harassed by ICE agents as she attempted to drive away.

The feds are spinning this story by painting her as a domestic terrorist who was trying to run over ICE agents with her vehicle. An outright lie, but what else would you expect from an administration who had the audacity to rewrite the events of January 6? The videos made by numerous bystanders show otherwise. No ICE agents were in the vehicle’s path as she attempted to escape. The person who shot her–four times in the face–was standing by the side of the car, not in its path. And besides, as my partner pointed out so matter-of-factly, if you want to stop a car, you don’t need to shoot the occupant. You can shoot the tires.

And after she had collapsed and crashed into a utility pole, ICE refused to allow a physician in the crowd to provide medical treatment, claiming they had their own medics, who, at the moment, were nowhere to be found.

I first read accounts of this story yesterday, sitting in the dark in my grandson’s room while he napped. And two things came to mind. First was a blurry melange from Schindler’s List and other Holocaust movies where Nazi guards randomly and blithely shot any Jew who wasn’t immediately conforming to whatever order was given.

The second was an event that happened to me when I was about Renee’s age. I was backing out of a parking space with my one-year-old in the car, when all of a sudden I heard this man knocking on my trunk. You hit me! he shouted. He told me he had fallen from the impact and re-injured his knee. Mortified, I dropped off the baby to my partner at home, a few blocks away, then drove the man to the ER. When he said he didn’t need me to come and wait with him, I drove to the police station to report the accident. When I gave the name of the victim, the policeman rolled his eyes. That guy’s a known scammer. I’d be very careful, he said. He probably didn’t even go into the ER. You probably didn’t even hit him.

And I had stupidly just shown him exactly where I lived!

The next day he called me and asked for money for medical expenses. I took the easy way out. I met him in town with cash.

I was lucky. I never heard from the man again. I have my life. I watched my children grow up, as Renee never will. The feds’ story circulating about Renee, embellished and exaggerated by Kristi Noem and Donald Trump, is another scam. A scam of out-of-control proportions, which if people start believing it, will give ICE the authority to keep randomly shooting anyone they deem “non-compliant”–to be no different than the Nazi guards were, needing no justification to shoot anyone they pleased.

So today, I’m wearing dark colors, feeling a different kind of grief, a stunned sadness punctured with fear for my country. Renee’s death is not the only senseless death of a protesting activist. I think of Rachel Corrie in Gaza, Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. And I think of the hundreds of African-Americans murdered by authoritarian police for no cause: George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Daunte Wright, Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark–just to name a few. More profiles and stories are here.

I hope all the readers of this blog–those of you who are inclined toward political action and those of you who aren’t–will think of one thing you can do in response to Renee’s death and this unraveling trajectory towards authoritarianism. Call your Congresspeople. (Jessica Craven has a script here), attend a vigil, write a poem, as Cyn Grace Sylvie did in yesterday’s poetic resistance blog, Second Coming, or make a piece of art. Post your responseon social media/and or share it with friends. Share this blog. Or share something else that might speak to you more deeply.

After I first read the news story about Renee yesterday, I only had a few minutes to absorb the severity of it all before my grandson woke up and wanted listen to clips of his favorite band, The Tokyo Paradise Ska Orchestra (an odd choice for a 3-year-old, but that’s where he’s at). He has about 50 cuts on the playlist his parents made for him, and was happy to put them on shuffle and see what came next.

Grandma, dance! He kept shouting as he bounced up and down to the beat,  a different stuffed animal in his arms for each song.

I didn’t feel like dancing. But this is life.

And as I bobbed around, I realized one more time, that this is why we must keep fighting. So we can dance.

Carolmooredc, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

If I can’t dance, then I don’t want to be part of your revolution.–Emma Goldman

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