My jaw was set before the coffee finished — the Roberts court gutted Section 2 yesterday and I felt it in the molars before I read it. The body knows. The land knows. We tend anyway.

Survival tactic for today: Before you open the news, put your bare feet on the ground for sixty seconds. Concrete, grass, basement floor — doesn't matter. Let your body remember what holds it up before the algorithm tells it what to fear.

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Atlanta: 61°, cloudy and softening — the dogwoods finally let go of their petals last night, white scattered across red clay like a confession nobody asked for.

Detroit: 43°, partly sunny with snow possible Saturday — May is supposed to be done with this, and yet.

Kansas City: 46°, mostly cloudy — the prairie wind hasn't decided what season it is and neither has anyone living in it.

New York: 49°, cloudy with rain coming — wet pavement, taxi steam, the gray that makes the city feel older than its buildings.

San Francisco: 52°, clear and dark — the bay holding its breath before fog returns.

Miami: 75°, sunny and climbing — heat that tells you every coming day will be hotter, and the ocean is keeping receipts.

Tha am bealltainn a' tighinn — Beltane is coming — the hawthorn is ready to flower along Ponce de Leon and the bees know it before the calendar does.

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Editor's note: The Roberts court is a kleptocratic cabal in robes, and anyone still pretending otherwise is collecting a paycheck for the pretense.

The Louisiana case — Callais — examined a plan creating a second majority-Black district in a state where one in three residents is Black. The 6-3 ruling called that unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. Roberts, who wrote the 2023 opinion upholding this exact framework, declined a concurrence explaining why he changed his mind. He just changed it.

What they actually said: "Today's decision is a victory for the Constitution and the principle that every American citizen is equal under the law" — NRCC Chair, on the day a court told Black Louisianans their representation was unconstitutional.

The wreckage: Up to 12 Democratic seats lost, 19 House seats potentially shifting Republican before 2030. The Florida House passed a new gerrymandered map within an hour — Castor, Soto, Moskowitz, and Wasserman Schultz targeted.

Pattern: Roberts cracked Section 5 in Shelby County (2013). The court chipped at Section 2 in Brnovich (2021). Yesterday they gutted what was left. A thirteen-year demolition.

Action: The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act sits in Congress where Republicans will not move it. Donate to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Fair Fight. Call your state legislators before the next census.

The court did not gut the Voting Rights Act yesterday. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted for years; yesterday they confessed.

What they were: an independent board of researchers, university presidents, climate scientists, computer engineers — staggered six-year terms since the agency's 1950 founding.

What they were working on: a report, due May 5, on the United States ceding scientific ground to China. Whether it now publishes is unclear.

The damage:

Relationship breaking: The NSF has lost an estimated 40% of its staff since January 2025. The pustulent charlatan tried to slash $5 billion from the budget last year. Congress blocked him. Without the board, those cuts run easier.

Scale: Climate.gov — gone. The US Global Change Research Program — defunded. EPA, Forest Service, NOAA, USAID — gutted. Mauna Loa Observatory, which has measured atmospheric carbon since the 1950s, sits on the chopping block.

Expert voice: Yolanda Gil of USC, a terminated board member, called the firings "no surprise" — a signal of "sweeping changes" coming. Rep. Zoe Lofgren called it an attempt "to destroy the board that helps guide" the foundation.

You cannot govern a country whose scientific instruments you have smashed, but the festering carbuncle in the Oval Office is not trying to govern — he is trying to break the thermometer because the fever has a name.

Action: Donate to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Read more.

The land does not need a board to know it is dying. It needs us to listen to what is left of the people trained to translate.

Stakes:

Pattern: 56% of voters polled by Fox between April 17 and 20 said Democrats handle trans issues better. Black voters: +54 Democrat. Hispanic: +19. Moderates: +22. Even 27% of 2024 Trump voters crossed over. Asked the most important issue facing the country, "wokeness/transgender issues" rounded to zero.

Timeline: Republicans spent over $200 million on anti-trans ads in 2024. Lost Virginia. Lost New Jersey. Lost three consecutive Wisconsin Supreme Court races. Earle-Sears outspent every other issue with anti-trans messaging in Virginia and lost by 15 points.

The narcissistic cesspool in office made trans erasure central to his agenda; his approval is 42%. The authoritarian-wannabe tyrant and his party are spending political capital on the issue least salient to American voters while grocery prices break working families. They are not stupid. They are committed — to cruelty as policy, scapegoating as governance, the spectacle of demonizing trans children because they have nothing else to offer. The Democratic leadership that keeps hedging on this ought to read the Fox numbers and locate their spines.

Movement: The Christopher Street Project, founded by trans activist Tyler Hack, endorses candidates with concrete trans-rights commitments. Find them here.

Trans people are not a wedge issue. Trans people are people, and the country has been telling pollsters this — even Fox's pollsters — for two years running.

To witness is not to fix. The Roberts court diluted Black voting power yesterday, the administration fired the scientists tracking the warming, the Republican machine spent the year telling trans children they should not exist — and the witness sees all three at once and does not flinch. Tha mi an seo — I am here. The first act of resistance is refusing to look away. The second is refusing to look alone.

What have you seen this week that you have not yet allowed yourself to name out loud?

The Burning is over for now. Tha sinn a' tionndadh — we are turning. The wheel moves toward Beltane, the old fire-festival when herds were driven between two bonfires for purification, when the year was understood to be opening, not closing. The hawthorn is the Beltane tree, and along Ponce de Leon this morning the buds are tight and ready, will be in full impossible white within ten days, and somewhere underneath the news cycle the older calendar is keeping itself.

Your body has been carrying news of a court that does not believe in you, of a science establishment dismantled in real time, of a political class that polled trans children and decided to keep attacking them. So we turn. Toward what came up this week without asking. Toward the people three feet away.

Anail. Anail. Anail. Breath. Breath. Breath.

Spring greens with garlic and lemon. Wilt a generous handful of dandelion, mustard, or arugula in olive oil over medium heat — ninety seconds. Add three sliced garlic cloves the last twenty seconds. Off the heat: lemon juice, flaky salt. Lus na sìth — the herb of peace. Bitter greens move stagnant liver energy, the body's Beltane reset.

The windowsill scallion. Save the white root ends from a bunch of green onions. Stand them in a half-inch of water on the windowsill. They regrow within five days, indefinitely, for as long as you change the water. The kitchen is the first place we refuse to be owned.

Pantry quick — eggs, spring onion, butter, garlic, frozen peas, lemon, parmesan; ten minutes; feeds four. Sauté garlic and spring onion in butter; add a cup of frozen peas, three tablespoons of water; cover two minutes. Crack four eggs over the top, cover, low heat, three minutes more. Lemon zest, parmesan, cracked pepper. No one in this house goes hungry because the week was hard.

Nettle (Urtica dioica) — the iron root, the spring tonic. Pick young, before flowering, with gloves. Steam two minutes to deactivate the sting. Strong infusion: one ounce dried nettle in a quart jar, boiling water, lid on, four hours. Strain. Drink throughout the day. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. Nettle delivers iron, calcium, magnesium, and protein the gut absorbs without effort, replenishing the adrenals the news cycle has been quietly draining.

Five-senses inventory — for the mind that cannot stop running. Five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste. The mind cannot panic and notice the texture of a wooden table at the same moment.

The five-minute call. Pick one person. Not the person you should call — the person whose voice you actually want to hear. Five minutes. No agenda. Connection is what fascism is trying to break first.

Tha sinn beò — we are alive — and being alive in this country right now is a practice. You will be told to manage your grief about the Voting Rights Act, your fury about the science purge, your weariness about a party that has chosen cruelty as identity. Refuse the management. Let the grief make you precise. Let the fury make you organized. Defiance is the daily decision to keep tending what the burning is trying to consume.

What are you willing to give up to keep the people and the practices you love alive?

These three are still writing. Still translating. Still here.

Carl Phillips — three decades of writing the queer Black male body into American poetry, sixteen books, the 2023 Pulitzer for Then the War. A syntax that taught a generation how to make a sentence vibrate at the edge of revelation.

Saeed Jones wrote How We Fight for Our Lives about surviving grief while being a young Black gay man in the South. Kirkus Prize. Stonewall Book Award. Hosts Vibe Check — a weekly survival kit for queer audiences.

Carmen Maria Machado wrote In the Dream House, a memoir of an abusive queer relationship told through structural genre play. NBCC Award. Her Body and Other Parties: National Book Award finalist.

Bright Signals:

New Zealand changed blood donation rules — gay and bi men can now donate equally; an activist who fought decades for the change donated for the first time this week.

Leon County wins — the Littlejohns lost their final appeal after a five-year campaign against Florida's LGBTQ-inclusive schools.

Christopher Street Project keeps backing candidates with concrete trans-rights commitments, and the Fox numbers suggest those candidates win.

Three writers, two policy victories, one PAC — what you tend in spring is what feeds you through the dark.

What today cost: a generation of Black voters in the South just had their representation officially diminished, the federal scientific apparatus lost its independent oversight, and the poll the GOP paid millions to ignore confirmed the country sees through them. The inside-and-far-away place Machado names is where queer and Black and brown bodies have always written from in this country — not a deficit but an architecture, the very specific kind of seeing that survives what would prefer it didn't. Tha sinn beò fhathast — we are alive still.

What in your specific body, in your specific life, is the inside-and-far-away place you have been writing from — and what would change tomorrow if you stopped pretending it was not where you live?

Stand if you can. Hands on the doorframe, the wall, the back of the chair. The earth is six inches below your shoes and it is paying attention.

Beltane is coming and the hawthorn is ready. Bidh am preas-droighinn a' fàs ge bith dè a thachras anns na cùirtean — the hawthorn grows regardless of what happens in the courts. You are carrying news today no body should have to carry, and you are carrying it anyway, and the carrying is itself a kind of root system. The court is a roof; the root is older. We tend through.

Slàinte mhath, a chàirdean. Bithibh sàbhailte. Tillidh sinn a-màireach. Good health, friends. Be safe. We return tomorrow.

The voices woven into this work:

🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Life Banter: brandonellrich.substack.com
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com

Become a member: thistleandmoss.com/upgrade