by Anna Akhmatova
The dark and solid separation I’m carrying equally with you.
Why are you crying? Come Give me your hand instead– Promise again To come in dreams.
You and I Are like grief and the mountain– We will not meet In this world. But sometimes Will you send across the stars A sign?
“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.”
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
by Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?
zoe kravitz . out-andabout
In a personal gesture of solidarity, Faith Ringgold designed a poster in support of the Black Panther Party unbidden by the group. When she presented her work at the Panther offices, it was rejected, as members pointed out that it would be imprudent to distribute a poster advertising the group’s office address and phone number.
Founded in 1966 as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the group had reached the height of its membership in 1970, when Ringgold conceived her poster. It was also being actively undermined and harassed by the FBI, with then Director J. Edgar Hoover calling the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Just the year before, the Panther leader Fred Hampton had been assassinated by the Chicago police and the FBI.
Faith Ringgold (American, born 1930). Committee to Defend the Panthers, 1970. Collage on cardboard, 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm). @moma, New York, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Endowment for Prints, 236.2016. © 2017 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“I have faced it. I feel much better. I am not hiding it from myself.”
— Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Aurelia Plath written c. September 1962
when john koethe said “i love the past tense, but you can’t live there”
Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)
self love
self love
