My Arrest at Trump Tower

This website mostly serves as an archive of my publications for the handful of people out there who might stumble across a poem of mine and be curious enough to google me. As such, my posts here are rote, sporadic, and often unenthusiastic links to those publications that happen to appear online. But last week, along with dozens of activists from the direct action group Rise and Resist, I participated in a pro-immigration civil disobedience action that I thought I would share. In the lobby of Trump Tower, we dropped three banners stating, respectively, “NO BAN” “NO WALL” and “NO RAIDS”. Trump Security proceeded to shut down the public atrium of Trump Tower for a couple hours while the NYPD went about arresting all 25 of us who remained (with our voices very hoarse from chanting). I feel very gratified to have put my body on the line and done my small part to take a public stand against this administration on the very day our president dropped the so-called “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan (which I did not find out about until I was released from the ninth precinct around 10pm). You can read more about the action (and see footage of me getting dragged out of the lobby with a very unbecoming grin on my face) here.