saw a lot of lightning bugs this week. i’m so enchanted by them. beaming gleaming butts. can you imagine. on humans. i shudder to think. the bugs though, they still me.
i’m writing you from saturday - June Jordan’s would be 86th birthday. june 14th was the 20th anniversary of her transition. i’m grateful to have shared a planet with her for the first 6 years of my life. she penned the namesake of this project, “it’s because it’s on.”1
enchanting blips. coincidences that somehow save our lives. i don’t know what possessed me to get her book of essays, Civil Wars, over a year ago, but i feel so thoroughly cared for by that accident.
ask me again, June, “What kind of schools and what kind of streets and what kind of parks and what kind of privacy and what kind of beauty and what kind of music and what kind of options would make love a reasonable, easy response?”2 and remind me how manners grease the wheels of our own oppression:
this observation has reverberated through my life. so much focus on the how, rather than the what of what we say to each other, especially concerning violence or pain. with this allegiance we lose, hard. there’s so much more June to read.
i go up to the roof and the sky is doing what the sky does each evening, different daily. dependably stunning. the moon is waxing. the sun sinking—leaving glowing pastels in its wake, hot and quiet.
here we are, for as long as a sunset, as long as the flicker of a lightning bug. someone told me they’re celebrating the end of a friend’s chemo tomorrow. today someone i know is at a funeral.
by now the glowing pastels have faded ochre. the bugs light up and vanish into the darkness.
the way June Jordan wielded english, and wielded love, teaching me about what it is to know how precarious this life is, what it is to live with any regard for this brevity. tell us the truth, she insisted. show us that you know anything about time.
“And then if you're lucky, and I have been lucky, everything comes back to you. And then you know why one of the free- dom fighters in the sixties, a young Black woman interviewed shortly after she was beaten up for riding near the front of an interstate bus—you know why she said, "We are all so very happy." It's because it's on. All of us and me by myself: we're on.” Civil Wars, xii ↩
Civil Wars, xi ↩
Civil Wars, 179 ↩