A PERSON

How many persons does it take to make an entire group of people feel unwelcome in their own homes?

One to tweet? Several million to vote?

MY HOUSE

At the Thanksgiving table, the family sits divided. There is only one table, but cousins sit worlds apart. This place did not used to be this way.

PLACE

Born and raised. Immigrated. Married in. Everyone has their own relationship to place. For some, their relationship is defined by territorial boundaries or literal roots, for others it is by the climate and things less tangible.

WEATHER

The weather has decided to reflect the mood on the ground: existentially challenged, reactionary, exclusionary.

Does the place change when the climate does? Or is it the other way around?

Process notes: I have vaguely settled on the rise of populism as my topic. I chose to adopt the style and paragraph headings from one of Adnan’s poems; I felt that these headings could be appropriate for my topic and it was easier to work within more specific guidelines, though I did change the order of the paragraphs few times. I connected the paragraphs by including a concept connected to the following paragraph title in the previous paragraph in order to make the poem flow better. The questions at the beginning and the end add parallel.