Noor Hindi, a Palestinian American poet, drops the gauntlet with “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”. Ah no, gauntlet is too genteel a word, a word with a history, a word that implies the rules of fair play. Hindi drops a big fat rock, cracking the bones of my feet, my means of staying upright. It’s been a year of outrage after outrage. Many white writers have left behind writing about flowers and moons to puzzle and blunder into oppression and voicelessness. Viet Thanh Nguyen asks in his essay on literature post-Trump in the New York Times, what will white poets do when the outrage is over? The easy path leads back through the meadow; the challenge is the thorny and unexamined trail to the vale of other beings’ tears. I blundered, I puzzled, I kept the view through this new window in mind as I wrote, but I thought of my own writing as beyond the mundane concerns of ego. I tried to say, look, there is a better world beyond and within. Look! But who, starving, without a home, with blood or tears in their eyes can look, can see, can respond? This is my privilege, the cut I need to make, the scab I then need to pick, watch bleed, let scab, pick again.