The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Olive Blackburn's "Communism is up there and we are down here but it is happening now"

this is what some undergrads sitting in a circle looks like
this is what eating a slice of pizza looks like
this is what liberals appropriating the symbols of
radicals looks like

a blackness seeping up through allegedly liberal politics

the usual evening activity of talking incessantly about
buildings and the assorted attempts to steal or burn them
spaces intensely under-fucked

our city is burning
it makes me feel like a soaring newborn crow
plumage black as all hell

Praxis is not some easy, calm, matter-of-fact task
for her, either.

This selection comes from Olive Blackburn’s book Communism is up there and we are down here but it is happening now, available from Timeless, Infinite Light. Purchase your copy here!

Olive Blackburn is a dancer, writer, and communist from Northern California. She is a doctoral candidate at UCLA in dance history. She lives between Oakland and Los Angeles. http://timelessinfinitelight.com/pages/oliveblackburn

T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently The Midway Iterations (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015), Fall (Lucky Bastard Press, 2015), and The Ep[is]odes: a reformulation of Horace (Noctuary Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Menacing Hedge, LIT, West Wind Review, Ninth Letter, Phoebe, and others. A weightlifter, artist, teacher, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she is the Vice President and Associate Editor of Sundress Publications.