My president
I’m writing this to you on Tuesday evening worried about tomorrow. Instead of what I planned to send today — a really great interview with the critic Sasha Geffen about what they learned about research and revision while writing Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Gender Binary which you’ll get next Wednesday — I wanted to send you a poem.
Every week I meet on Zoom with a teen I was paired with in 2017(!) as a writing mentor. She was in middle school when we met; she’s been 17 in March. Last week, over Zoom, we watched a video of Danez Smith reading their poem “my president” which was published in a collected called Homie last year. Then we watched it again. Then we read it. Then she wrote her own version of the poem, one where she claimed herself as her own god. It was one of the best thing she’s written since we started working together.
Today I share “my president” with you and hope that it makes you feel something like what I feel when I read it: that our communities know the world better than our institutions, that we need jokes, too, when everything is terrible.