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We are more interested in the rule we have broken than the rule we abide by when we break it.

Adam Phillips

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One must perpetually mutate in order to remain what one is.

Hasana Sharp

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At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness.

Adam Phillips

[northnode]

To Myself, by Franz Wright

You are riding the bus again burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,  the sole passenger with an overhead light on.  And I am with you. I’m the interminable fields you can’t see, the little lights off in the distance  (in one of those rooms we are  living) and I am the rain and the others all around you, and the loneliness you love, and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe, and the catastrophic dawn, the nicotine crawling on your skin— and when you begin to cough I won’t cover my face, and if you vomit this time I will hold you:  everything’s going to be fine I will whisper. It won’t always be like this. I am going to buy you a sandwich.

#franz wright #poem

[northnode]

Brown Girl Levitation, 1962-1989, by Nikky Finney

(for Beulah Lenorah Butler Davenport, supreme watermelon, cantaloupe & pansy grower)

Something sharper than any blade cuts the heavy roped balloon cord at the end of my wrists; ascension begins. No tingle of warning, just the thin, rising held-breath of a brown girl, super sudden lift, then, the instinctive dive & grab for anything dependable, two ton, well tethered, close:

Shaggy, heavy-bellied, near blind sheep dog. Bulbous, well-rooted, yellow meat watermelon. Iron held, black leather, Detroit-Buick car arm. Steel blue, cavernous, baby brother crib roof. Brass, honeycomb canopy, octopus jungle gym. Mesozoic era, roots, trunk, cane field of azalea.

I could smell it inching closer to full power, like a storm nearing from across the field of my young life. Except, it wasn't over there, coming. It was inside, gaining on me, blooming. I could not grab my girl hat and run. Could not turn my long yellow feet into brown girl spikes and beat it home. Wherever I happened to be when it hit—I had to hunker down.

I would lean hard into that high, elephant-lifting wind with everything I had, carrying my girl mind & muscle to the thing that I knew had been grandmother sent, engineered, just for me. And there she would appear: straw hat, cotton dress, cow boots, rabbit grass stogie between her two front teeth, walking the dirt road back to the old homehouse. Her humming heart in mighty step with the bee wings of the July air. Her arms full of as many bowling-ball headed, green-striped melons as she could manage. The red sweet flesh, the jet-eyes, my just-in-time juicy body weights passed from her arms to my lap, until the great gray wind retreated & agreed that I'd had enough & turned me loose, disappearing back beyond, into the indigo heaven, until the next lifting time.

#Nikky Finney #poem

[northnode]

So excited about… 

Life Chances: HIV Criminalization and Trans Politics

IN CONVERSATION WITH CHE GOSSETT, DEAN SPADE, AND SEAN STRUB

April 24th, 7PM, FREE! Don’t sleep on this one y’all!

more info here

[northnode]

"Tell Mrs. Thatcher to Stop Supporting Apartheid & Pinochet.. Stop killing Bobby Sands, Irish political prisoners, Argentinian and British soldiers, tell Mrs. Thatcher homophobia is bigotry... Tell Mrs. Thatcher the Poll Tax is not on...

Tell Mrs. Thatcher our resistance will outlast her onslaught."

- Zackie Achmat

#margaret thatcher #zackie achmat #african activist archive

[northnode]

a series of medicinal plants that grow in Florida

prints are for sale

5X7- $10

8.5X11-$15

11.5X17-$20

contact [email protected]

[northnode]

The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I'm alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they're only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren't stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn't trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising.

- Richard Siken

#richard siken #snow and dirty rain #poem

[northnode]

june 2007

stairwell at my old job, where i used to go for calm and sunlight, six years ago

[northnode]

You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam’s twin is blood

Barbara Ras

#barbara ras #you can't have it all #poem

[northnode]

I'd live on the moon probably except I think I'd miss the moonlight

Richard Siken

#richard siken #anyway #poem

[northnode]

wisdom tooth recovery

I have discovered that chocolate goes really good with vicodin.

[northnode]

We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.

James Baldwin

#james baldwin #another country

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John Clang - Time (2012)

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[northnode]

The strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn't but because you didn't have to: it was not a question of moving on to the next move, but simply, of being present.

James Baldwin

#james baldwin #just above my head