#raeparis

i read the news in bed this morning. looked at the pictures. baltimore.

saw the swat lines. saw

young, black bodies. looking

to find a way home. looking to grace the fight

in their skins. amerika,

you pockmarked the atlantic.

protect property?

saw the swat lines.

saw the swat lines.

you are not innocent.

you are not innocent.

hampton, slept.

destruction curdled in my body. freedom

rhythm. i want to set

police cars on fire with you. bash

windows to tiny pieces of glass with you. throw

bricks in the air with you. where it lands,

no matter. breath, property, property, breath,

breathe, breath, breath, your breath. freddie gray.

i got up from bed. stretched for 12 minutes. felt

my back crack, and cry.

i go to rae paris’s ‘the forgetting tree.’ i have returned to it after every

ruse of state innocence, since trayvon.

can’t trust the swat lines, swat lines, court lines, sentencing lines, media lines.

the poetry lines,

help me grieve:

My head swims today with conversations cobbled together by the poems and sobs and diary entries of Ralph Lemon, Rae Paris, Dawn Lundy Martin, Amara Tabor-Smith, and still Saidiya Hartman goddamit. Mostly, the conversation is about memory.

I recently forgot my word and destroyed a relationship.

I cannot, for the life of me, remember my grandmother. Even though she lived with us briefly when we were kids, even though we used to pay her to clean our house.

Saidiya is compelling me to think of memory as a place, bordering a continent on three sides and an ocean on one, where you return to when you decide you do, after all, need territory.

Dawn is compelling me to think of memory as an opaque thing that, from time to time, "might obstruct the noticing of other things, and thus, the reinvention of the contemporary self."

Rae is compelling me to think of memory as both there and not there. Like a cardboard box both in that it is a solid and real place to store things, and in that it can be a house or a blanket or a fort or a tree.

This weekend, Amara made me very confused about memory. Which way does it go? More on this later.

I am more confused than before.