Wishing for More Good News from the Supreme Court

In recent years, it's been difficult to find anything heartening about news coming from the Supreme Court. But for as long as I've been involved in gay rights and queer liberation movements, one of the holy grails that seemed almost within reach but just unattainable for now was a national prohibition on discrimination in the workplace.
ENDA -- the Employment Nondiscrimination Act -- floated around Congress for decades. Each time Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, it seemed close to getting a fair hearing and maybe passing. Then "religious exemptions" would be inserted in the bill that created such wide scapegoat loopholes that even LGTBA+ leaders felt compelled to abandon it. And then, as has been the case most of the time in recent decades, Republicans would reclaim one or both houses of Congress and the lid was slammed shut on any talk of protecting queer people from discrimination.
So now the Supreme Court has ruled that Civil Rights legislation passed decades ago does in fact protect us from workplace discrimination. I'm not an attorney but I'd love to read about the legal reasoning that led to this ruling, with the support of two conservative justices. Hats off to the attorneys who brought and prevailed in this case. And if let's hope the two conservatives who sided with the majority, Roberts and Gorsuch, might show more affinity for progressive legal arguments. The conservative Supreme Court has been a thorn in the side of progressive governance for too long.
On unrelated news, a few weeks ago Jericho Brown won the Pulitzer Prize for his latest poetry collection, "The Tradition." He's the seventh African American to win the Pulitzer for poetry (and the first openly gay one). He's amazing, and he's created a new form, the duplex, which is spreading in popularity among contemporary poets. His poem, "After Essex Hemphill," might be inspired by a park in D.C., that was always known as Malcom X Park when I lived nearby in the early '90s. (It's official name was Meridian Hill Park). I find Brown's work brave and seductive, righteous and adventurous. From the aforementioned poem:

"...As we kneel illegal and
Illegal like Malcom X.
This is his park, this part
Of the capital where we
Say please with our mouths
Full of each other, no one
Hungry as me against this
Tree. This tree, if we push
Too hard, will fall. But if
I don't push at all, call me
A sissy...."

And it ends:
                     "The night
is my right. Shouldn't I
East? Shouldn't I repeat,
it was good, like God?"

If the poem is set in D.C., that's the closest tie-in to the Supreme Court decision that I can think of. At any rate, buy "The Tradition", go hear Jericho Brown read, and rejoice that people can no longer be fired for being queer or transgender.

Zoom in on Me (or on Other Poets, Preferably)

Well, Zoom has allowed me to hear a number of writers who I probably would not have seen reading together at a traditional bookstore, academic auditorium or arts venue reading. Five famous poets! All together on one night. And you get a vicarious, voyeuristic glimpse into their living quarters.
Still, I'm longing for the real thing. One or a handful of poets in the same place at the same time, their voices or the voices of people reading their work unamplified and undistorted by electronics and technology. How about a reading sitting around a fire pit in a public garden in New York City's East Village (social distancing style, of course). Ah, those were the days.
Still, I appreciate the online alternative. The Quarantine Reading series organized by Aurielle Marie (and featuring headliners Phillip B. Williams and Justin Phillip Reed on successive nights) was perhaps my favorite Zoom reading room lately. And I'm grateful. Two nights of wonderful poetry by some of today's most vital voices -- who could ask for anything more?
But I'm longing for the olden days, as they say. I was walking through Boom Island Park in Minneapolis a little over a week ago, before the city fell into grief and outrage, and I ran across a man  sitting on a park bench playing the saxophone. I told him what a relief it was to hear live music (he demurred, insisting that what he was doing was practicing, not playing music) but to me it was music. Coming from a real musician with a real instrument within my hearing distance. Those were the days.
So, I'm looking forward to hearing all the poets I've been listening to read again soon -- hopefully as a member of a live audience.