This letter was written to my dear community — OPAWL: Building AAPI Feminist Leadership — who I have been working with for several years, but in the last two have been serving as the Director of Operations and Communications. After much contemplation, I resigned from my position with heartfelt love. The letter was sent today, my last day in this role.

Dear OPAWL,
I still remember after I moved back, one of the first things I did was conduct a proper google search to make sure that THIS TIME! I will stay put and not move away. I typed “Filipinos or AAPIs in Ohio” and I started reading about something called “OPAWL.” Sign me up! Shortly, I started receiving the emails and jumped at the first thing that sounded like a good challenge: travel to Washington, D.C. and lobby on the Hill for the Value our Families legislation. It was a thrilling experience and pulled me in.

OPAWL gave me energy, so as I grew more familiar with the organization, I co-created “Feminist Grounding,” a group sharing circle to reflect on what healing looks like in an AAPI body. More energy came, which led to facilitating healing circles and connecting with others after the Atlanta Spa shootings. Then on a long drive across the state, I found myself on the phone with Tessa asking me if I would consider serving on the board of directors. The answer was YES. These powerful experiences led to a whispery thought: “Maybe someday, if the right invitation presents itself, I will work for OPAWL.” Which brings us to the summer of 2022 when I began in a new role as the Director of Operations and Communications. As Ohioans, you must remember that tagline after you crossed the state line that read: “Ohio! Find it here!” Well, friends, I often DIDN’T find it here—even after moving to and from Ohio five times across my lifespan! But, OPAWL invited me to do something different than head longingly for the coastal cities. I seized the opportunity to help create the Ohio that I wanted and needed as a brown child growing up in white schools and churches.

After two years of community formation, systems and infrastructural building, and organizational development and strategy, I find myself transitioning again. It is bittersweet that, coincidentally, my last day with OPAWL in this role falls on the same day to mark the end of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

Some folx have asked me, “Why are you leaving?” First of all, don’t worry: I’m not. I’m just shifting out of a particular role. But the deeper and more truthful answer is this:

Like many of you, I have been witnessing the global atrocities, and sitting with the call from Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo to not only end the soulless, catastrophic violence, but build the world we all need. How do we do that? How do I do that? 

As organizers, we demand that people ask themselves to transform in order to bring about the world we need and deserve. How could I not ask myself the same thing? The more I sat with the simple question, “Who am I called to be?” the more clear the call became and I decided to return to my work in creative writing. My answer was to make space in my life to be fully present to myself as a mother to two children, a descendent of elderly immigrant parents, a life partner, and a politically conscious artist purposed for collective liberation. 

Who are you called to be in this moment?

My heart is full of gratitude to all of you for supporting me in my work. I am profoundly grateful, especially, to Tessa and Jona who have grown OPAWL from its seedling years with their own and their families’ lives and energy. Their labor has enabled OPAWL to root and rise: to create a staff and a 350 person (and growing!) statewide membership. As someone with a record of repeatedly absconding Ohio for crimes of coastal reprieve and then returning, I can attest to the miracle that OPAWL is—to have lived in this state BEFORE this organization existed and then to experience it as a thriving entity, and to have worked inside the innermost folds of its heart—with the members, staff, and partners. What a rare gift, truly. 

I integrate this transformative experience and take it with me into my new chapter, where I will undoubtedly continue to world-build with all of you, but in a different capacity and voice. There are no goodbyes, my friends, just another transition and refitting session with this community I love so dearly. I genuinely hope each of you is able to grow with OPAWL as I have.

Thank you, OPAWL, for being a place where I have been able to practice the most essential life skills—to organize across differences, hold the friction of uncertainty, rally for change, and invest in relationships as a primary and medicinal lifeline. Most of all, thank you for allowing me to discover that I am capable of fulfilling one of Grace Lee Bogg’s most divine principles:

“The most radical thing I did was stay.”

Toward a freer Ohio, to a free world—

Lisa Factora-Borchers

This poem was written for Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16 year old girl who was shot and killed by Columbus police. An adaptation of this was read at a vigil and protest on Sunday, April 25, 2021 that took place on the front steps of City Hall in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The vigil was organized by Pint Sized Protestors, a volunteer run organization dedicated to educating and uplifting children as they become the next generation of politically engaged citizens.

—–

The poem I’m about to read was written in the legacy and practice of using poetry for political action. This poem was collectively written, meaning as I constructed it, I invited others who had words for Ma’Khia to share them so I could integrate their words into this piece. This way, it is a community of people from across this country who are using their voices to uplift Ma’Khia Bryant. Because as the prolific and legendary Black poet June Jordan who also addressed and cared deeply for children said, “the task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks…I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something. I feel that it’s a spirit task.”

This is our spirit task to uplift the life of Ma’Khia Bryant.

Everywhere, Ma’Khia Bryant

If you walk around this city, if you listen closely

you can hear the voices of true sages, our children

If you pause in your walking and cup the wind

you can hear the youngest seers speak 

to us in question, cries, and laughter

If you walk around this city, if you listen closely

You can hear Ma’Khia Bryant, our child

If you pause in your walking and listen to her voice

You can hear from a baby girl who chose to walk on rainbows

A glow baby with midnight clouds for hair

Shimmery eyes that closed too soon

and you can hear a laugh that sprays

color in sour patch glitter

Ma’Khia, your life was precious and it was ours to protect

and now, baby girl, you are a star and ours to uplift

As we breathe in this city, we exhale you

Our breath is your breath

Your brilliance, our lamplight 

We want you back, but you’re in a new constellation now—

One that shines down on our homes, sky scrapers, and driveways

from the quiet Ohio harvest fields to gritty littered curbs

Your sixteen years of light will burn our transformations 

so we are more than just good little soldiers of excuses 

We will keep the poem of your name on our lips

as we walk this city and look for you

We will find your spirit everywhere and scan the city 

through your eyes so even as you are with your ancestors now, 

you will always be with us.

In the early months of the year, when COVID was just beginning in the United States, I was sick and never received the results of my test. I wrote about parenting, brain fog, and the duplicitous nature of COVID’s impact on me as a mother writer for Mutha magazine.

My latest is up at Guernica!

I recently started working on a typewriter. It’s more than old, more than a pleasure. It is an exercise in deliberation and reading with imperfect aesthetics—a perfect medium.

The way my fingers fatigue from pressing down so hard, the way I don’t know how to use the ancient typeface waters my drought as I have become more restless with summer’s press. I’ll post the prose here.

Free writing into these gorgeous miscalculations of font and working on a machine that doesn’t have a functioning backspace or precise spacebar breaks hard habits of sanitation, of uniformity.(Praise God for typewriters.)

Miss Leah is one of my favorite people on the planet. Their brilliance and overall badass existence spills into the literary and activist worlds in all shades: poetry, performance, art, writing.  At the heart, always, is community. I had the opportunity to interview them for Guernica Magazine, talking their latest book CARE WORK: DREAMING DISABILITY JUSTICE.  Check it out!

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Michele Filgate for Adroit Journal about her new work WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON’T TALK ABOUT: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence.

Check it out!

I waited a few months before circulating this. Sometimes when I write about grief, my hands are slow to circulate the vulnerability. But, it’s up. It’s been up.