Daniel Sarah Karasik
"Against the Law"

Because the law, I hear, is a technology
of power, I frenzy on a Sunday night
in search of wooden pencils
needed for the LSAT.
Blow the test, or feel I do,
and mind and don’t quite mind, because
the law, I hear, is a machine
of capital, or let’s not be
quite so reductive, let’s just say
the law gives text to power
built elsewhere, in boardrooms
or in the streets, is male
in its forms of enactment, phallic
in its sophistries, its stern Socratic certainties
about the weight of argument
in settling or discerning right.
I took some pretty selfies in tight panties
last night that my lover, pegging me
as lithe enough to slide
into them nicely, bought me
prior to my masculine evaluation date.
Quite wet and hard I would’ve been
if I had worn them on that morning,
lace beyond the proctor’s gaze, infringement
of unwritten rules from law’s halcyon phase
when it was plausible enough, for some,
to think the law respectable, as instrument
or way to spend one’s days. My teacher who
had lawyer brothers called the law a form
of trash collection, clean-up crews invoked
when the ripe mess grew just unbearable.
Pleasure, healing not the guiding principles.
Despite what I thought at age eight, not a clear way
to make an ache for justice wearable, as if
a sterling silver pin on a lapel. Believe me,
I’d prevaricate like this upon just about
any work it fell to me to do. But standing
against law, against the law, against it
like a thief who steals bread for some hungry strangers
whom she’ll never meet is stood against the law
that stands against the whole of us,
that lays waste to, denies so many
possibilities in us—well, that just seems
a simple, mandatory way
to advocate for you.