Amy > Books: z2015-popsugar-bookriot-challenge‎ (54)

how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clea

how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance –no matter how improved – as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.

But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing—that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed.

You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.

the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly.

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

“Yes. It’s a small library. It’s a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish.”
“What’s your point?”
“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.”
Wow. That was a huge idea.
Any town, even one as small as Reardan, was a place of mystery. And that means that Wellpinit, that smaller, Indian town, was also a place of mystery.

It’s ironic, isn’t it,she thinks -- you don’t have to get more attractive to catch your husband’s eye; you can just get sick and ugly.
But God she loved that old self of hers! She hadn’t appreciated it enough. Why hadn’t she celebrated those big strong thighs instead of trying all the time to shrink them? Why hadn’t she found her feet beautiful, or her sturdy ankles? Why hadn’t she loved her coarse, graying hair? Why had she not praised every perfect square inch of herself? She feels an almost unbearable ache of longing for all that doesn’t belong to her anymore.

We will not live to settle for less

I am not with her I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain not simply absence but
the presence of the past destructive
to living here and now

This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved –
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children-
women, deviants, witnesses – in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts – their hands clasped for centuries--
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this stlll unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

When I turned eighteen, there was a small party on the fifth floor of the music building, because the guys could flirt openly with me and not get arrested, but even then, I was too shy to hook up with them. Not that I didn’t have the desire to. In my heart, I wanted to be with one of the classical guitarists because they were the biggest pick-up artists in the musical world. They had the quietest instruments, which meant they could play in the hallways and not get yelled at, so they sat around playing sexy classical guitar all day, and panties just DROPPED. But the few times one started circling me seriously, my professor would see us together and say, “That flamenco scam artist? He’s not good enough for you, get back to work.” And I’d skitter off back into my practice room and lock the door against a potentially glorious and rhythmically complicated seduction. Sigh.

They eat their packed lunches and drink weak coffee from Styrofoam cups. Neither has much of an appetite. The male guard reads a car magazine. His female counterpart knits a pair of blue baby socks for her best friend’s baby.

There are no names on the urns. You die a number here.

The lady is like me in many ways. Serpents crawl inside her. She is deathly afraid that others will see them. She is afraid, and yet she wants the priest to see inside her and accept the monsters that wrap around the secret, pure part of her – the part she managed to save, miraculously, that so many of us have lost. She know the monsters are there and yet wants to be seen. Her courage frightens and amazes me. It makes me hopeful for her. It makes me crave happiness for her. Is that what you call love? Is that what you call hope?

‘It’s one of my favorite things to do,’ Stephen Coles says at the FontShop office in San Francisco. ‘You get to play with type, pick the characters that are most interesting and do what you want with them. For a type lover it’s like porn.’