My newest fic is out, bringing together characters from DC Super Hero Girls, Futurama, Bravest Warriors, Sym-Bionic Titan, Samurai Jack, and Kim Possible to debate Israel's brutal and genocidal assault in Gaza, complete with Nristen Snelker of Meet the Mess (an original character, but based on a real person). As I say in the fic's summary, Snelker is "faced one of the toughest discussions of her career about Israel's brutal and genocidal assault in Gaza, complete with angry Zionists, international popstars, and legal analysts. Can she hold it together or will it all fall apart?"
Takes a dried up ballpoint, lemon juice and water, keeps diary invisibly. In the kitchen corner of a basement bachelor suite, there's a certain search for certainty, you know we'll never see her hands touch her childhood home in photos that she took. It's one more omission from a highschool history book; how whole lives are knifed and pushed aside. To whom it may concern…
(To whom it may concern…) There's a bus that's leaving half an hour from now.
(This is to inform…) It won't take her where she really wants to go.
(Yours, sincerly yours…) So she sits there with her luggage at her side.
(Yours, sincerly yours…) In the empty stations of our empty lives.
Take a broken bottle, take a rafter beam, or take a needle and a tarnished spoon. All just words to kill off one more unheard statement of another dying afternoon; she says she's leaving soon. So so long to ten hour shifts and faking sympathies. Farewell to piles of bills, unpaid utilities. All rolled up and unfurled like a flag. Wake up and pack your bag... To whom it may concern…
(To whom it may concern…) There's a bus that's leaving half an hour from now.
(This is to inform…) It won't take her where she really wants to go.
(Yours, sincerly yours…) So she sits there with her luggage at her side.
(Yours, sincerly yours…) Leaving empty stations leaving empty lives.
"It's like being sick all the time, I think, coming home from work, sick in that low-grade continuous way that makes you forget what it's like to be well. We have never in our lives known what it is to be well. What if I were coming home, I think, from doing work that I loved and that was for us all. What if I looked at the houses and the air and the streets, knowing they were in accord, not set against us. What if we knew the powers of this country moved to provide for us and for all people. How would that be, how would we feel and think and what would we create?"
the spoken word at the end is from poet Karen Brodine.