Jill Richards, Distribution Series

Work in Progress

for Kristin Koster, after the meeting, after the meeting.

1.

It’s summer and the fan is on in whatever room we are in. The anti-repression committee throws a party to raise money for the bail fund and it seems like everyone is there but that everyone is not very many people that afternoon we watched 3 movies in a row and the whole time I was trying to think of a single word that meant only a little better but not much, actually not better at all but, from certain angles, looking like it might be better than before

2.

At reading group there is an argument about what a lull is and whether it exists here or not. There is an argument about who attends what meeting and who speaks for how long. The people I know work shit jobs or have no jobs or keep working the jobs that promise to lead to better jobs we agree that it is lonely now, that it is lonely at home and it is lonely in the large groups of people at the beginning of the summer the Holdout was robbed and the robbers separated the white people from the non-white people now there is a door that is locked after dark

3.

All of the summer movies are about the end of the world. There are the assemblies and readings and conferences and camps and radical journals where the people who are organizing try or are told they should try to get equal numbers of everyone of black people and white people and brown people and men and women and trans people and queer people and people with disabilities to be the ones that talk they want or are told to want everyone represented on stage in proportion to the numerical population of each group there on stage

4.

Maria and Jamie and Sophia and Mo and August and Kasha and Will and Ali and Jasper and Chris and Aaron all move to different houses or apartments. Sarah’s hair is platinum blonde RCA has a new sign or I didn’t see it before that says revolt in ten-foot letters on the top of the house at the queer and feminist group there is a go-round and people talk about the Holdout and then what they have been doing this whole time Laura Riot’s daughter is there and we play with the spindle toy she has while people around the table fold pamphlets and there is popcorn that everyone eats

5.

The anti-repression committee organizes marches downtown every Saturday for the hunger-strikers in Pelican Bay. The police at the march are confused because we want to go to the south side of the jail where the isolation cells are not the north side past Wiley Manuel where the noise demos happen Wendy and I are holding a banner that says fire to the prisons fire to patriarchy or something like that and I keep trying to catch her eye to say this is weird that the police are so nervous no one is shouting because we aren’t sure which way to go down the street but she doesn’t look at me

6.

The people on the stage at the conference or the assembly or the reading are supposed to represent other people or be like a slice of other people somewhere else, not in the journals and readings and cultural events but in the houses marched past in the marches maybe the plaza. The people who are stopped and frisked, the people who could not get jobs, the people who didn’t have the money to leave, the people who were harassed, the people raped, the people without homes, the people addicted, the ill people and the people on medication, the people who are not allowed to get sick, the raging people, the lovers, the people who yell unexpectedly, the people with kids, the married people, the people harassed at work, the people who are bosses, the people that don’t care about the conference and the assemblies we know that it is not just this person or that person that it is a structure of violence unevenly distributed onto black people and brown people and female gendered people and queer people and trans people and people with disabilities and it is agreed that it is a little better because when you look at the stage it looks like all of the people are represented there on the stage

7.

During the second hunger-strike march Officer Masso the officer that shot and killed Allan Blueford was in the police line at the corner of Broadway and 14^th street. There are not many people left they have gone home but the people that are left shout together murderer murderer murderer we shout child-killer and go home and fuck you and murderer murderer murder when Masso leaves the shouting stops and maybe there is some cheering I’m not sure but we the people around me are not cheering

8.

In downtown Oakland there are homemade posters that say Wanted Officer Masso.

Everyone knows that outside of this assembly or reading or conference where everyone is represented equally is one thing and that outside of the poem or the conference or the assembly is another that the people who shake sometimes still shake and the people who are stared at are stared at the people who don’t belong don’t belong the people who are beaten are beaten the people who can’t pay rent can’t pay rent the people who are bosses are bosses and the people who are harassed at work are still harassed at work before and after they are the ones that speak on the stage

9

July 26 is Fruitvale Station the Oscar Grant movie. Some people went to see it together Tim S. was talking about projecting the riots on the outside of the theater but I don’t know if that happened Joshua didn’t want to go but did go Oki cried in the theater and said everyone around her was crying that month there were other riots in Oakland after the Trayvon Martin verdict, but I wasn’t there I was in Rhode Island because I couldn’t find a good job in Oakland Bristol, Rhode Island was where there was the best paying job for summer rent

10.

The posters and the panels and the presentations in the streets and the squats and the communes in France. We had a queer and feminist camp where people flew in from other places Baltimore New York Seattle Montreal Tarnac Maya and Kasha and I drove and got lost on the freeway we pulled over in the middle of a field to smoke cigarettes there was communal cooking I cooked enchiladas with Gemma’s moms they told me how when they were in meetings all the women would talk together in the bathroom beforehand and stand up and leave all together if they needed to if no one was listening to them

11.

That the stage matters and the assembly matters and the meeting where everyone stands up and leaves matters. But everybody knows that that is one thing that everybody being represented equally here is here and in here there are still the people who decide who gets what when both here and there and here right now doesn’t change the before and after the stage where people get jobs and buy medicine and have sex and drive to the store inside that same structure here and there that distributes violence unequally or who gets what when the people who are beaten are beaten and the people with shit jobs have shit jobs the people who are shot are shot and the people who are stared at are stared at which is not to say that the here right now on the stage doesn’t matter they are just different things

12.

It was not this summer but a summer or at least a warm night. We were wheat pasting posters in the Mission and mixed the paste in Station 40 it was one year after the day that Marilyn Buck died at home after she had gotten out of prison but barely in time there was a fire-truck and the firemen yelled fags at us when they drove by we made fun of the fancy stores that were closed for the day and got drunk later having left one of the buckets with wheat paste on the sidewalk and the posters pasted all down the street that had Marilyn’s picture on them and what she did