Katherine Isabella Olsen

Selected for the University of California, Berkeley Creative Writing Festival

Published in the 2025 digital Writing Festival book and highlighted on the Cal Student Learning Center website

This poem was one of 15 poems selected and performed at the Cal Creative Writing Festival

My roommate, the activist,
concealed and carried a sharpie
to scrawl on all the bathroom
stalls and walls of cafes
for the youths to see and believe—
at least for the vegans
that spent their allowance on thrifting.
I don’t mean to be

Uncharitable: my roommate, the activist,
would transit publicly to protest
far and near, to hear the calls
to action, to progress, to the moment
they would mask and cover fresh tattoos;
holding hands against police 
shields and breaths against 
pepper-spray perfume. I know

My roommate, the activist,
took all the right classes
In hopes professors wouldn’t penalize
The Right Thing To Do,
but they got marked down for missing material
and certainly looked down on me for missing marches
although they never told me where they started.
I don’t mean to sound

Disinterested: my roommate, the activist
posted the best instagram
stories I’d ever seen, graphics peer-reviewed
by fire, informational without instructions
or structure: I do not know what
they wanted to build, I was not
allowed into this building.
And I watched as

My roommate, the activist,
moved out and on before I
could tell them of the votes
I cast and gathered in the agora,
my degree increasing vital signs
at apogee, I apologize for building
what I could with those you turned away.
At last we stand united in this world

The words have brought to life.
I could not find those bathroom scrawls:
they were not written for me so I
wrote with those who, by rote
were written out.