Photo: Han Chenxu/Unsplash

8. 30. 2022

“prima donna”
&
“for Chile, on the day after a status-quo federal election in the Canadian state”


Daniel Sarah Karasik


prima donna

my rage is a diva orchid:
I neglect it
for just one second
and it wilts into despair

for Chile, on the day after a status-quo federal election in the Canadian state

“they stole so much from us they even
stole our fear.”

most daily papers hardly note
how the protests spread from schoolkids
leaping transit gates to union comrades
downing tools. disorder’s what
the techno-barons’ outlets say.
a monstrous mass, belligerent:
austerities that animate it
(stole so much from us they even—), the build
to the breaking point erased. tanks in the streets
make elders think of Pinochet. the young
where I live see, online, those schoolkids
who look just like them
enacting a defiance that’s so simple,
so impossible: you can do that?
just leap over the barricades?
refuse to pay?
reject outright
their terms of play?
together?

Daniel Sarah Karasik (they/them) is the managing editor of Midnight Sun. Their most recent book, in which these poems first appeared, is the poetry collection Plenitude (Book*hug Press).

“prima donna” and “for Chile, on the day after a status-quo election in the Canadian state” from Plenitude © 2022 by Daniel Sarah Karasik. Used with permission of Book*hug Press.

The first two lines of “for Chile…” quote Jérôme Duval, “Chili: « Ils nous ont tant volé, qu’ils nous ont même pris notre peur»,” Politis, October 22, 2019.

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