Two Pieces by Zosia Mosur

A Relapse of ‘67

In the summer of 1967, hundreds of thousands of people found their way into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Runaway teenagers, artists began a revolution. Drugs sanctified themselves as a pathway between peace and reality. As the city overflowed with recreation, intoxication, and love, a new light of society opened its eyes. A disregard of the classical domestic lifestyle paved the way for a generation of pacifists. But as the abundance persisted, those who entered the city searching for utopia retreated, and those who arrived for euphoria remained. 

I finished reading Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” just days before Trump’s inauguration. Allen Ginsberg’s timeless epoch opens its mouth, reciting its predictions to me. 

Ginsberg writes, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked … who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism … who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down …who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts.” 

“Howl,” San Francisco, 1954-55. 

As young girls housing unwanted fetuses, bruised transgender youth, punished lovers are shucked from their homes, floods of America’s shunned will find their way into San Francisco just as so many had some 60 years ago. Trump’s administration deepens its knuckles into the backs of the American youth; the Summer of ‘67 is homeward bound. 

Visions of young bodies shimmying raw to the faces of authority blaze into non-fiction. Light streams of families trickle up from the melted cascading sea-side Santa Monica mansions. Fentanyl shakes hands down every lane, nicotine has moved into “peach-strawberry-lush-ice,” and there are 9th grade girls who have been sober for 2 years. There are 9th grade girls who relapse in the bathrooms, test positive for xylazine, and are huffing again on the same day. 

A summer of love has been steeping in 60 years of propaganda, of drug-resistance and “strengthen-it”- persistence, and an age of documentarists. Just as climate change returns from her rest with fingers to point, executive orders will supernova into a mass necrotizing of America’s youth, through suicide, drug-use, and violence. Guns lay on their sides in the underneath compartment of wooden school desks. Teenage victims of abuse bleed out in hospital beds surrounded by cowardly doctors. Statistics climb heights past my search bar, prying: “suicide among trans kids.” The Panhandle will find its shade occupied by stoners, homeless kids, and the Joan Didions of our time. Many will fall victim to the cleverly named streets of our city. It will be as epic as the enlightenment as the ‘60s. A relapse of ‘67 is crucial to the de-homed youths of the Trump administration. The death toll will be innumerable, death by law and death by its defiance.

Snowqueen of Texas

Up-sleeve, Communist Manifesto, a girls 

up-sleeve cello, Further North than the light-

Steppin into raw cement, smack dab whoops

It’s that capitalist, 5th grader’s college list,

-to my senses and out of my 10 cents in

be a Beatle, time I sleep for real&for good

So French, so green underground, so bubbly,

the big corkboard with the pictures, 

to the Red String. It’s okay: I make it cute.

throbbing, pulling, stifling, squeezing, 

into what I'm calling “Devotions.”

An and an dand who are you to cay-uhh. 

Breathy- clay and in debt, to those who wait

and don’t get good things. I musta prayed

come true/come granted. My luck is getting

Where’s this script! Why’s everything perfect, just perfect.