The Best Stuff I Read This Week

your black friend wonders if you know that, unlike you, he has to constantly monitor his speech, dress, and affect relative to his enviroment and a misreading could mean the difference between being the black friend and that black guy…

— Ben Passmore / Your Black Friend

I glance at a photograph
of a boy, peeled skin
arms legs suspended
a puppet
next to a lab coat lost
in his clipboard

— Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner / “History Project” / Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter

. . . we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.

— Martin Luther King Jr. / “Where Do We Go From Here” / from speech delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967

Every event had the finality of a last judgment . . . that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.

— Hannah Arendt / The Origins of Totalitarianism

One function of poetry is to heal the wounds. These ideas in my mind, I don’t really know what they are until I put them on paper. People who are unable to go through this process, of getting rid of things, transferring or transforming them, lose their mental well-being, their psychological balance. If they can’t write, or deal with their nightmares by reading, by putting them on paper, or somehow sharing their feelings with other people, this deepens the wounds. These nightmares will continue to come up, in their dreams and their reality—it’s very hard. One way of dealing with it is just telling it to other people and writing it down so you can know what disturbs you. I often think of writing about all these hideous ideas and these hideous events and just setting them on fire, so that I can burn these nightmares.

— Mosab Abu Toha / “Interview with the Author” / The Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

I have the comfortable feeling of being an inconsequential member of a litter, like a puppy or a kitten. I have a place but am not outstanding in any way. This is a feeling I have always enjoyed enormously. It heals me in some subtle way.

— Anne Truitt / Daybook: The Journal of An Artist

Child choked out, belt at throat. / She returned to me in dreams.

— Allison Adelle Hedge Coke / Look at This Blue

What I’m Listening To:

I quit
My head is lit
A piece of me
This is my stop
This is the end of the trip

— The Smile / “I Quit”