They Tell Us
By Dawn Tasaka Steffler
I
Wait until buyer’s remorse sets in
Wait until it hurts the farmers
Until it hurts the veterans
Until the social security checks stop coming
Until they take away birthright citizenship
Until they take away freedom of speech
Until they take away the vote from women
Until another pandemic rears its head and hundreds of thousands die again
Whispers circulate
But what if we don’t want to wait?
Where are the protests?
What are we so afraid of?
Actually we are very afraid
We only act brave
II
They tell us we are the sleeping bear
And you know what they say
You don’t want to poke a sleeping bear
And one of us asks in a clear young voice
Why don’t we want to poke the bear?
If we wake the sleeping bear won’t the nightmare end?
Everyone nods their heads in agreement
They tell us
No, we’re going to roll over and play dead
Wait, are we a sleeping bear or a dead bear?
III
They tell us wait until the midterms
If they want to hang themselves give them plenty of rope
Don’t stand in the way of the process
Perplexed we look to our left and our right
to the person standing next to us
One of us whispers
I don’t think they know what they’re doing
This has never happened before
Ah- but it has
another one of us whispers
Just not here
Dawn Tasaka Steffler (she/her) is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and was selected for both the 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 long list and 2025 Best Small Fictions. Her stories appear in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, The Forge, JMWW, and more. She is working on a novella-in-flash that explores the challenges and joys of parenting queer kids. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on X, BlueSky and Instagram @dawnsteffler.
Photo credit: Ged Carroll via a Creative Commons license.
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