My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Yesterday I listened to a news commentator tell me that in a few weeks things will have died down and we’d be “back to normal.” Really?

Normal used to mean the legal enslavement of Black people. Normal, in my grandmother’s day, meant she couldn’t vote. Normal, when my mother was pregnant with me, meant she had to hide her pregnancy to keep her job. Normal, when I was a kid, meant if you were gay you pretended you weren’t. Normal right now means, among many things, that most citizens live paycheck to paycheck while a few make a billion dollars a month.

Normal is a prism that shifts and changes over time, depending on your skin color, your sex, your gender, your age, your job, your money or lack thereof. I don’t want to go back to normal. Where I want to go is forward.

the demons were never, by Shilpa Kamat 

evil just regular
                                      people who prayed
                                      and were granted

thunderbolts
ethers
                                      before their hearts
                                      were grown
enough to keep
up

For more information about Shilpa Kamat, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast