Claire Lee
Civil War
The empire keeps edging me with the threat of its impending collapse. Just do it or don’t, but none of this in between business where my tax return gets drawn and quartered, and the people on Instagram reels say to buy when the market is low, even if my MBA-riddled mother tells me not to listen, that all will correct itself soon, as it always has and always will, even as it finally gets sunny in LA, and Gabe from downstairs takes to practicing his guitar riffs in the parking lot outside of my bedroom window, and I want to drill a hole in my head every night at 3am when he writes another song about some girl he met at some bar in some east side neighborhood where some group of nose-pierced white people discuss the merits of civil resistance over my wet, bloody body. My mother doesn’t realize I don’t think I want it to level out, the collapse, this whole war thing that sinks in the froth of Gabe’s IPA from the beer garden down Sunset. What a funny descriptor, to denote revolution as something non-militant. Not for nothing, I think it makes the targets feel less afraid, continue with their little megalomaniac meddling, let them keep believing that partisan propaganda that the people are not armed. Hang those words like an ornament on the christmas tree of liberal pacifiers buried within my head. Civility. Correction. Recession. The star on top is warfare.
Claire Lee is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles, though originally hailing from Memphis, Tennessee. Find their published and forthcoming work at Pictura Journal, Black Sheep Magazine, Eunoia Review, and on Substack (clairelbea).
Banner Art:
from The Too Recent Past, David Dodd Lee, 21st Century
