Today, I Am Not Kind Because I Love Love,

I am kind because I hate hate.
If viciousness drives a luxury car,
I am scratching my initials into its paint
using only the ragged edge
of my tenderness. This may be
the age of distance and shame
but I am kissing the hands of my friends
while I can. I am making it weird.
I am confessing my commitment
to the bumblebee who spent her last calorie
mistaking the palm of my hand
for a buttercup, curling up inside it,
and dying. Sometimes you’ve got to piss
in apathy’s coffee, antagonize the hell
out of indifference. You become
furiously nonviolent, wild with love,
hurling small mercies into your life
like you’re pitching stones
at the closed glass windows of cruelty.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.