I wonder if reading a poem is like trying on the rhythm of the writer's spirit.
- While reading Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.
The blacks, they do be knowing.
- After learning that Alice Walker was deemed anti-semetic for criticizing Israel and standing for Palestinian liberation. Also see James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and Malcom X.
And they said slavery was in the past but here we are just working working.
- On a capitalist exhaustion with little to show for it.
We are beyond the point of pretending to be okay.
We are beyond the point of superficiality. There has been a shift.
And for some it was just a tremor but for me it was an earthquake.
- On my daily distress with the state of this nation. On the notion that I would have desire to maintain superficial relationships with people who lack the depth required to meet me in my distress.
I’ve seen the life I used to live and by god I am grateful it is done.
- On revisiting a broken thing.
An American Lyric
Biden and Harris offer us thoughts and prayers when we have asked for our lives.
Did you hear me?
I said we asked for our lives.
- On why I cannot stop screaming.
My existence requires a critical analysis.
It is not a hypothetical thought experiment, it is how I survive.
- On being black and being woman.
We will love your art in rooms full of white rage and indifference
we will marvel at your audacity.
telling stories just for us.
- On white rage after reading Kiese Laymon at a writers retreat in Canada.
Silence and terror live at home
Silence and terror live in the blood
Passed down
Like
Precious gems
Locked tight
in the brown bodies
of everyone I love.
Unspeakable violences.
Still we go on living.
Of course we must go on living.
- On learning that “on the backs of several lynching photographs are hair from the person or persons who had been lynched.” Re Note 41 from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes.