Bread and Bread

Among the celebrities lending their voices to the movement for Black lives, John Boyega has stood out. Not just because he’s put his body on the front lines at protests and because he’s shut down Twitter trolls with delightful wit, but because—in our house—he is Finn. You know: the ex-Stormtrooper stolen from his family and raised as FN-2187. When he refuses to kill for the First Order, he defects and eventually joins the Resistance. It’s not the subtlest metaphor, and I’m not the first to say “Yes, this guy! The guy who took off his blood-smeared Stormtrooper helmet and refused to be a cop for the last gasp of the Empire!” But at this moment in history, I am especially grateful for how much Dash, at age 5.5, adores him. Before schools closed in March, I had never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through, although AK, Dash’s other mom, flew her toy Millennium Falcon around her childhood living room and, as a forty-something adult, has been known to read Star Wars fan ficti...

1. On my first day off in weeks I stand with my son watching a spider who has spun a web in the bamboo a floating silver blanket that has snared a ladybug. The spider pedals his back legs a busy typist or a mother preparing dinner. The ladybug yields, all squirming undercarriage her red jewel of a shell consumed by white thread. I wonder if I should intervene and what the metaphor might be. This is the week protesters stood up in the name of Black bodies and our president wielded the military in the name of the bible. I sat home, a typist, tangled scared and tired. 2. Dee Dee Blanchard named her daughter Gypsy Rose, and that's half of what you need to know. Smile, baby, she told her child after ordering a dentist to pull out her teeth. I let them entertain me. She pushed her in a wheelchair, a pink blanket over her strong legs. Gypsy stood up in the night took off her oxygen mask ate frosting by the light of the fridge looked up "kissing...

On Friday night, I scrolled through a feed of burning cop cars, protesters in cloth masks, and cops in riot gear. On Sunday morning, I looked at pictures AK texted me from the park: Dash next to a glassy green pond. Trees stooped to touch their branches to the water. I stayed home to catch up on work, which meant writing this blog post about my org's work in the context of police violence. (Official Organizational Statements declaring solidarity with Black people have become a thing in the past few days, which is part of what makes this time--this violence, this uprising--feel like a tipping point, like the moment homophobia finally became an unacceptable default mode. Of course, homophobia has not gone away and even most of my nicest straight friends are casually heterocentric. So tipping points are not victory, but they are  a victory, a big wave in a sea of incremental change.) (Official Organizational Statements also bump up against my dislike of platitudes and virtue signal...