wonderness

[wonderness]

you will live and you will say the wrong things and make mistakes and people will love you anyways.

[wonderness]

diogenes tries to forget by Mary Karr

[wonderness]

spring

after Louise Gluck

it’s late now, it’s early, no way to know which season it is of the total years of my life, weren’t we only just nineteen, tonya & i, wasn’t she only just alive, long-limbed & cross-legged on my dorm room floor, wasn’t it springtime of a year so unlike this one, thirteen years past, cool nights in line outside the nuyorican hoping to make it on the list, wasn’t it a friday night like this one & the only people i wanted to love were poets, earrings swaying against their necks, dancing in the dark of the room where we all knew each other’s secrets, weren’t we all just at that party, wasn’t i only just eighteen, pointed northward on a chinatown bus to that city, to watch ai elo onstage at the apollo, wasn’t she only just alive, smoking with camonghne, asking me my favorite song, cackling on the apartment floor, on the air mattress we used as a couch, how is it that it was long ago, how is it i am on the other side of it, long ago, how did i leave that city, that time when we were all together, everyone alive, wasn’t the dream to be a poet, wasn’t the plan to live forever, our powers newly acquired, newly in love with what we could do, didn’t we all belong to each other, to that work, going after to the pizza shop to recite what we’d memorized, weren’t we all just there, wasn’t it warm outside, wasn’t the road long & clear, isn’t it early still, isn’t it late, & why am i still here, did i survive or was i left behind, & what season is it that we are no longer together & some of us have gone?

SOFIA ELHILLO

[wonderness]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

#essays #literature #lit #reading

[wonderness]

Sarah Kay, from “And Found”, No Matter the Wreckage

[wonderness]

“I want to love something. / I want to love something without having to apologize for it. Please don’t tell.”

— Hala Alyan, from “I’m Not Speaking First,” The Twenty-Ninth Year

[wonderness]

Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”, Glass, Irony, and God

[wonderness]

“Anger is an acceptable form of grief. You don't have to make your emotions palatable to those who are unmoved. Rage isn't the curse, apathy is.

In the absence of relief, our collective conscience can atrophy. You begin to believe this is the way it has to be. Resist. Dehumanization of the suffering is by design, but it is not an inevitable one.”

—Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies, January 2024

[wonderness]

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

[wonderness]

Photography: Palestinian school girls smile to the camera as they come back home in their school bus on September 22, 2016 in Gaza City. Photographer: Mohammed Abed 

[wonderness]

Mosab Abu Toha, from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

[wonderness]

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

[wonderness]

i hope that when i die there will be an apartment with everyone i’ve ever loved in it and we are together always

[wonderness]

richard siken’s new poem in the new yorker—at the link, you can hear him read it in full

#the dream of becoming #richard siken #poetry

[wonderness]

Hanif Abdurraqib interviewed by Ruth Awad: Joy Is Not Promised to You

[wonderness]

Hanif Abdurraqib interviewed by Ruth Awad: Joy Is Not Promised to You

[wonderness]

Julian K. Jarboe, ‘First Contact, Communion’ from Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel