Written for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, Jan 1, 2026, NYC.
Proof
You have to imagine it:
Who said you were too dark/too
Large? Too queer/too loud?
Who said you were too poor/
Too strange? Too fat?
You have to imagine it:
Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then
Rolled their eyes?
Who tried to change your name
To invisible?
You’ve got to imagine:
Who heard your name
And refused to pronounce it?
Who checked their watch
And said “not now”?
James Baldwin wrote:
“The place in which I’ll fit
Will not exist
Until I make it.”
New York, city of invention,
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,
New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,
New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,
Where there is always soil
For your root.
This is our time.
The taste of us/the spice of us
The hollers and the rhythms and
The beats of us.
In the echo of our
Ancestors,
Who made certain we know
Who we are.
City of Insistence,
City of Resistance,
You have to imagine:
An Army that wins without
Firing a bullet,
A joy that wears down
The rock of no.
Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear/up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.
You have to imagine:
That space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit, on its way.
This moment is our proof.
.
.
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Imagine coasting through flu season with barely a sniffle. Or brushing off COVID, no matter how many times it mutated.
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The comparison with 1979 is lazy because it assumes that history is a model that repeats itself in exactly the same way. So when the bazaaris protested and closed their shops in late December, many “Iran-watchers” perked up, suggesting that this moment would result in an overthrow of the state. In fact, whenever there’s turmoil in Iran people reach for the 1979 analogy, a move that narrows our political imagination and stunts our analytical capacities.
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Halfway through 
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In the original clinical trials of