wcw c/o ariana reines c/o poetry month 🔌

everything the ♥️ needs now, otherwise known as the poetry of wanda coleman by mahogany l. browne, amber tamblyn, patricia smith, jeffrey mcdaniel, and terrance hayes ✨🌕 (at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop)

perfect.

For Halloween I’m gonna be emotionally stable. No one’s gonna know its me.

Andrea Gibson (via rarararambles)

hell on earth & the city's on 🔥

🦄 (at New York, New York)

I believe in art the way other people believe in God. I’m not trying to make a tricky sentence. It’s just true. I have found reasons to breathe again by living in communities of people who choose self-expression over self-destruction. It’s another way to form hope, without hierarchizing it so that you’re looking up toward a God, or someone smarter or more famous than you are. It’s a lateral definition of hope where you just need each other, and you need to stand up and not leave each other hanging.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Praying. 

I read in the paper that my brothers are being thrown from rooftops blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs for violating sharia law. I heard the crowds stone these fallen men if they move after they hit the ground. I heard it’s in the name of God. I heard my pastor speak for God too, quoting scripture from his book. Words like abomination popped off my skin like hot grease as he went on to describe a lake of fire that God wanted me in. I heard on the news that the aftermath of a hate crime left piles of bodies on a dance floor this month. I heard the gunman feigned dead among all the people he killed. I heard the news say he was one of us. I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a faggot as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty. That was the last afternoon I saw my father and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t shock me if it wasn’t. Many hate us and wish we didn’t exist. Many are annoyed by our wanting to be married like everyone else or use the correct restroom like everyone else. Many don’t see anything wrong with passing down the same old values that send thousands of kids into suicidal depression each year. So we say pride and we express love for who and what we are. Because who else will in earnest? I daydream on the idea that maybe all this barbarism and all these transgressions against ourselves is an equal and opposite reaction to something better happening in this world, some great swelling wave of openness and wakefulness out here. Reality by comparison looks grey, as in neither black nor white but also bleak. We are all God’s children, I heard. I left my siblings out of it and spoke with my maker directly and I think he sounds a lot like myself. If I being myself were more awesome at being detached from my own story in a way I being myself never could be. I wanna know what others hear, I’m scared to know but I wanna know what everyone hears when they talk to God. Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?

<3 

26 may 2013

Take my body apart. This. Are you thinking of me. Being the verb of it. The city is a geography of where we made out or highways we drove in silence. Arbiters of false hope. Let’s first list each thing we’ve ever done. I love. How many others are out there thinking of me. I would have. I would have loved. I would have loved you. Like a darling pomegranate. Wreckage, a present. The carelessness with which I perform. The glass rim. Waking is difficult. To awaken. To forge ahead and create. Feeling is easy. Not easy to remember. What if we are the same people meeting over and over.

S

Relevant again.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means to escape.

bell hooks (via andrewgibby)

Everything.

Watch Channing Tatum and Beyonce “Run the World” on Lip Sync Battle.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Zadie Smith (via feellng)

Female friendship has been the driving force in my life. I love loving men, but I love knowing women. These relationships strengthen and define, torture and enrich me.

Lena Dunham, on her “Women Of The Hour” Podcast

So I think in some ways, I don’t at all recommend taking off your clothes in front of strangers for money. In fact, I didn’t talk about it for like a long time because I didn’t want to be like, a role model. But now the whole world has sort of gone to hell in that direction, and I’m like 'Whatever, you know. Everyone listening to me is already naked.'

Miranda July on “How To Be Amazing with Michael Ian Black” Podcast

Absolutely.

Adele lets loose in this open letter which she posted on her Twitter account today and talks about regrets and the importance of not wishing her life away.