Everything Is Healing&Intimate

I think that maybe if we can guard ourselves and each other, if we can keep from losing our minds alone in quiet rooms and can at least lose them side by side, we may live through the year.

All my friends are sisters and husbands I'm afraid to be uncharted I want an empire in my teeth but I can't be bothered to not wear silk or nothing I have grown up less mysterious than my myth All men do is think I'm looking at them When I think about them tasting me I don't I mean don't google my tits when you can just Unfortunately I have a body and I'm the only one in charge of it you know what I eat the bones too I'm in the world I'm in the world nobody cares where I came from

What makes this difficult to detail is how special it felt to be chosen. How painful to be a color swatch when walls are no longer a thing to be broken but a place for false exploration.

This is your time to turn yourself into one of those women who wait, forever and a day, til the bantu knots dry.

When you look at me, know that more than white is missing.

What Du Bois describes as failure, I describe as wayward forms of intimacy, family, and affiliation. They are a queer resource of Black survival, marked by the anomalous social formation of Black life that unfolded in the hold of the ship.

No, that’s not what I meant … The body is also a thinking organism. And black folk are bodies that think. We think all the time.

I feel most colored when I am collecting dust. When I am impatient and sick. When they use us to distract us. My ears leak violet petals. I sharpen them. I sharpen them again.

Even though the monumental work of racism presents our lives and our art and our geographies as transparent, knowable, and always tied to oppression, there are some parts of blackness they just cannot have or imagine or grasp.

If we think about the correlation between black women and anger as more than just, “let’s push back against this representation we don’t like,” there might be something useful for us there. The image of the angry black woman can’t do the work. Arguing about whether or not the “angry black woman” is a good or bad representation won’t really move the dial.

Peace on this planet Or guns glowing hot, We lay there together As if we were getting Something done. It Felt like planting A garden or planning A meal for a people Who still need feeding,

I toss without rest In the darkness Until the new dawn Wan and pale, Descends like a white mist Into the court-yard.

Damn right I got the blues I’m so fed up I could shoot a room full of men From the back of my dreams down to my laugh No one cares about nothin unless it carries them What the hell are you asking me again

I don’t want to clean but my mind is sick Best thing to do is pick up a broom & forget about it But I don’t want to do what’s good for me I only wanna to do what’s good for you