ON DEVOTION 

White folks do land acknowledgements 

in historically Black neighborhoods. 

The International District always has been 

Asian, but, perhaps because Hispanics 

(insofar as these are coherent categories) 

moved in next door, it changed. So now 

both live where once was a Hooverville 

tent city mayored by a weird woman 

with a broom. In my neighborhood, I’m new 

to the turn of the till on this patch of earth, 

the morning plenary of baubles in 

the bamboo, the bamboo, the blue jays’ 

flight path, omen or portent. There are, here, 

smaller and fewer trees, so a different 

constellation of birds, small gods for which 

I do not yet know how to pray, what 

bone to pick or burn, flit. I have never 

had a yard in the city. If the line is a plow 

pulled one end to another, readying dirt 

for seed, my sentences are the patch. 

The syntax of my garden make no sense 

some seasons, as in what floats above 

shape them more than I would like to 

admit. Of course, there is what we say 

and then there is devotion, balance of

faith and action, for which there is a version 

that makes us believe in the certainty of

solitude, so hideously mortal, but, listen—

reader, beloved, even here—there is no 

de-peopled substitute—even in our glass 

sphere city, cannot self-serve at a corner 

store or deliver by drone. Devotion is

the till, the tool, the towel that stinks 

even after the wash. The air that breathes 

you knows all manner of lungs and furnaces 

and shivers in the leaves. The trees. 

The trees. The trees. Equanimity weathers, 

feels so much like bravery in its interest 

in truth or what it is as opposed to what 

I want it to be. Pain is not disorientation. 

Disorientation attends pain when we 

are not ready to be with hurt, to believe

we can withstand what comes next. 

We must expand what we know can grieve. 

Scroll. Skip. Tap. Urban planners have 

historically planted, I learned on Tik Tok,

male trees because less mess and because 

private property is inherently theft and 

because patriarchy and and and… allergies. 

A history of displacement is basically 

invasion, but later, I read trees are, in fact, 

very queer. Most tree species possessing both 

male and female flowers, either that or 

every flower has both pollen and ovaries. 

I watched a play today, and I don’t know if 

I want to fuck the main character or be her. 

Today, a play watched me torn. It is a gift 

to be the object, to be in touch, to be 

with another asking, to be owed, owing. What 

devotion to desire. At all times, I am 

learning we are all prompted, being 

inducted into the grammar of animacy. 

When I say we, I mean the poppies, too. 

The mimosa tree before and after it blooms. 

The two-hundred-year-old cedar, the biggest 

in the city, cedaring in our front yard. 

The coyotes frequent less on the high-hill. 

The hummingbirds sweetwater. The rabbits. 

The rabbits. The babbits. All verbs. My grief 

is a relational dialect. When I divorce 

my pain, the arrangement flattens, falls apart. 

Everywhere is home. My preferred 

language is listening, so I assume thanks 

and please, which can easily be mistaken for 

impoliteness, a kind of savagery projected 

onto me by a social positionality stunned 

by the fear of knowledge. How it came to be 

the only major American city named 

after an Indigenous person whose defining 

characteristic was friendliness to settlers 

is now the seat of a county named after 

a civil rights leader who warned against 

the recruitment of his memory in the service 

of empire is a kind of devotion, too. People 

have rabbit nature, I’m telling you. 

My lover told me this. It is bi-directional 

in every orientation, and the history of making 

it make sense is a kind of conquest, hammers 

straight, the bright line of progress. It is so 

inevitable to lose people without attending to 

what we’ve done to lose them. Imagine 

what we’ve done with the earth, the place 

arounds and homes us. Nasturtiums sprout 

overnight when no one looks. Community is 

a word that works even when no one 

knows it. The only pronoun confusion 

that matters is that which determines 

who is alive to decide how we (or they) live.