#[insert] boy

"If I am to believe in what you call history/ then I can't believe in what you call progress./ Every hero I have ends up a liar or shot./ I stopped counting the ways to disappear bodies./ Sometimes all I need is music, other times fuck your song./ What is your blues juxtaposed to the black & ruby-wet of night?"

"You are the scraps/of the beginning you are not meant to end so soon"

Melissa Reddish's favorite books of 2015

I was hooked by Danez Smith the first time I read him: “I come to you out of ink, of breath, of patience, & almost emptied of any belief that there is anything in this country that doesn’t seek to end me, keep me and my black & brown loved ones from living lives that are not designed around your comfort and benefit,” he wrote in “Open Letter To White Poets,” an impassioned plea to white writers to speak to other whites that he “cannot reach because what I make is degraded… for its label of black art.” Indeed, as long as white poets are trained in a world of segregated anthologies, canons, and reading lists that will include the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets but not the Black Arts Movement (except perhaps a Baraka that is 90% Le Roi Jones), as long as these institutions are not changed (and not with the tokenism of a minority scholarship for a talented 1/10th), this will remain the case, even if the mere fact that I became aware of him through a piece called “Open Letter To White Poets” may be seen as evidence of Smith’s “crossover success.”

I have no peace left, it's been replaced by smoke & I am sick of always running from the fire this time. I am sick with impossible hues of black boys, their dark ghost, crow winged angels raised lynch high off the ground. I mourn all the time right out the sky. I got no need for the sun & the moon might as well be a warning shot.