Associate Editor Taylor Byas: Jay Julio’s “Leftist Love Song” pokes and prods at the all the ways our current political climate has disappointed us, peels back the mask of the “American dream” to reveal the devastation that lies beneath it. Julio demonstrates how love can be our most complicated emotion, and within it we might also find rage and bitterness. And it is this push and pull that allows us to suffer and dream, to be let down and still feel hope.
To hear Jay read the poem, click below:
Leftist Love Song
It’s true: I fell for a world
reimagined, heart palpitations
a cause for health care
unconditional. A Band-Aid
not to bill for thousands but to cover
what insurance won’t, wouldn’t.
The promise of telescopes in the night, skies
scientifically dark. Train cars knocking
metronome—the night beat of a city
born by labor, Black and Brown
and housed. When I fell,
it was into the arms
and branches of trees
instead of sun-cracked streets
they were named after. I imagined
child’s play, the superpower
to keep every light on
after losing a job. How impossible:
the power to dream after having lost
an election, nearly losing another.
After learning sage would only cover
rat smells, not necropolitics. And, beloved,
how the spine of even the strongest
philosophy would crease in the heat
of a book-burning. Only the most minor
of magic could steal away—
a double-mask snug to ward
off death, bodies seeing each other off
to the next destination,
street fridges so stuffed they sing.
Jay Julio is a first-generation Filipinx-American multi-instrumentalist, writer, and educator based in New York City. Their poetry has appeared in the Mississippi Review, Meridian, ROOM, Barrelhouse Mag, and Poetry Online, among other venues. Interests include abolition and ube ice cream.
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