Chalk Dust Rising [Narrated]

This piece is an alternative version of my recent essay, What They Can’t Scrub Away. I came home from a month in the UK to find murals erased, rainbow crosswalks scrubbed under halogen light, and vaccine protections under attack—all dressed up as “freedom” for political theater.

The original essay was measured; this one isn’t. It’s the result of simmering anger and frustration at a state that feeds red meat to its base by erasing stories, silencing memory, and endangering the vulnerable. This poem is my refusal to normalize that—my reminder that color, memory, and resistance endure, even when power tries to bleach them away.

Chalk Dust Rising

I came home
to streets stripped bare—
forty-seven crosswalks
painted gray.

At dawn they scrubbed the rainbow.
By noon,
neighbors chalked it back.
By dusk,
it was gone again.

“Democracy dies
to the sound of paint machines,”
a minister said,
and the asphalt reeked
of chemicals
and decree.

Florida calls it freedom:
mandates erased,
children left unshielded,
memory bleached at night.

First, call the public good personal.
Second, call the square neutral.

Abandonment becomes liberty.
Erasure becomes order.
Public health, a stage prop.

But chalk dust rises
like prayer.
Murals return
like heartbeats.
Neighbors kneel
where color was erased.

I will not call this normal.
I will not call it neutral.

They can thin the paint,
gut the books—
the work remains.
So does the color.
So do we.