Contemplations While Holding Sunchokes During a Blizzard
I want to be surrounded by splendor, but beauty is capitalism. This is to say
purchase power is how I was taught to love things & now I am exiled
in a country where living is only spectacle & roses, never bread.
How do I feed a village when my only skill is personal acquisition, not
distribution? My god, how wrong I was to covet dresses over firearms,
poetry books over agriculture. Ross sends me sunchokes from his garden
& I squint my eyes at them, trying to imagine the texture of drawing
food from the earth—my hands in dirt turn into rope pulling Good & asking
for forgiveness. They are killing us & we are all just going to the office,
watching tv & ordering out. I thought we were supposed to be resisting.
The deaths will accumulate like the snow & we will all be forced to forfeit
our lives for the revolution. I’m tired of hearing how nuanced it all is. It’s not.
They say it has everything to do with money & power, but what they want
us to forget is that it is about how we love. We are fighting for the right to
spend a storm inside
making soup & sourdough
& no one gets shot—
Copyright © 2026 by Yesenia Montilla. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 8, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“When Renée Nicole Good was murdered by ICE, I wondered what it would take for us to defeat that kind of evil. Is it to become as violent as the oppressor or to love more deeply? Capitalism asks us to make acquisition of things a priority and our relationship to one another performative. We are dying because of it. This haibun is an invitation for us to take stock of our own living, interrogate all the ways that we contribute to this system daily, and [ask] what the hell we are going to do about it.”
—Yesenia Montilla