PARTICULATES // Tulips
Or, Estimating Respiratory Effects of Ambient Air Pollution and COVID-19 Using a Policing-Climate Adjusted Hazard Function
Health Promotion Practice (2021)
Abstract
Through poetry, I offer a creative, critical analysis of the intersections of COVID-19, structural racism, and racialized police violence—situating present COVID-19 discourse within a broader historical arc of respiratory distress within communities of color, all while centering Earth Day and climate change as both metaphor and corollary. In doing so, I enact poetry as praxis, reflecting critically on the racialized contexts and consequences of overlapping threats to our health, while simultaneously crafting counternarrative to public health’s ahistoric, apolitical, and racist proclivities in times of public health crises
We movin’ up in the world . . .1
. . . like ventilators
allocated by algorithms2
built by the same hands
that collapsed
Eric.
I can’t breathe.
But it’s Earth Day
so I’ll plant trees
to offset secondhand chokes
in the light of a rising sun.
Uproot these particulates3
like tides, pens
without memories
or fingerprints clicking
while the cameras roll and
mouths shutter, feigning
surprise at the deforestation—4
permitted,5
while our fossils fuel
spring flowers.
Let’s clear this space6 and make
room for someone else
in this urban heat island7;
let’s switch to solar
and power organic tanning beds
next to cafes where black
gets dripped
for white lips
on lattes, Blood
Orange interpolating
with the hum of A/C.
it is what it is . . .8
Caught between asthma9
and COPD,10
these lungs aren’t built
to survive the formulas
of a science without conscience
creating a public without memory:
it’s always been hot
when selling trees leads
to bodies being planted
on Earth Day.
So let’s burn sage
in her memory,
our melanin coloring
the soil for new tulips
to rise . . .11
Me and you,
your mama and
your cousin, too.12