“The day after Trump's inauguration, there was, down the street from where I live in Tucson, Arizona—as there was all over the country—a protest. As it was starting, a person on the microphone thanked several groups of people. Among those who received the most voluminous and heartfelt thanks was the local police department. It seemed, in that moment, that the police were not only being exempted from the forms and agents of oppression against which people were protesting, but that they were being welcomed, as guardians, onto the side of protest. This poem was written a year later, at a different event: Tucson's All Souls Procession, where I again observed people's warm interactions with the local police—and the police's playful interactions, in turn—this time on the occasion of a different memorialization, and of a different kind of death.”
—Brandon Shimoda