{"id":299,"date":"2024-10-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","slug":"breathing-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/28\/breathing-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Breathing space"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Ma, I&#8217;m coming home today \u2014<br \/>\na watered down and greenwashed<br \/>\nversion of myself. <br \/>\nPastel pink and grey walls,<br \/>\nwhite oleanders <br \/>\nin the leafy green garden \u2014<br \/>\nI&#8217;m grateful I can return home.<br \/>\nLet me hide in the closet<br \/>\nin my bedroom, as I<br \/>\nhug my knees to my chest<br \/>\nin the greyness of four am, <br \/>\nbreathing.<\/p>\n<p>I strangled the poet in me <br \/>\nand now face a life sentence <br \/>\nin the black hole in my own head.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m as guilty as the moonlight,<br \/>\nwhich is to say that I&#8217;m really not.<br \/>\nMy fingers can&#8217;t write <br \/>\nof the soft and sanguine<br \/>\nwhen an entire people<br \/>\nis about to live in history,<br \/>\nonly in the past tense.<br \/>\nI cannot sleep at night.<\/p>\n<p>A patch in the bedroom plaster <br \/>\nlooks like a gray mouse in a white <br \/>\nhouse and maybe that would stop<br \/>\nthe genocide and I&#8217;m left <br \/>\nwondering why our love for Earth<br \/>\nis so all-consuming that <br \/>\nwe devour her and spit out bones<br \/>\nto leave behind a graveyard <br \/>\nfor the children, <br \/>\nof the children.<\/p>\n<p>Let me stay until the warplanes <br \/>\nare silent and the horizon <br \/>\nis no longer covered <br \/>\nwith crimson clouds and blood rain. <br \/>\nThen, I&#8217;ll leave with the Lego set<br \/>\nof my childhood, so that I may<br \/>\nbuild this world again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ma, I&#8217;m coming home today \u2014  a watered down and greenwashed  version of myself.   Pastel pink and grey walls,  white oleanders   in the leafy green garden \u2014  I&#8217;m grateful I can return home.  Let me hide in the closet  in my bedroom, as I  hug my knee&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajulea.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}