dig

“… & I place blushed

                         begonias newly-potted on my windowsill—

sad replica of my childhood garden. still, I wept

             when my grandmother’s tree returned—

                         replanted messy by surreptitious hands.”

Native Title by Ina Cariño

“un hasard n’est jamais qu’un destin qu’on ignore”
“… vouée aux gémonies”
“la piste de son fantôme”
“les solitudes jonchent le sol de prisons sans geôliers”

Sarr, La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud. Other Press. Dedicated to Yambo Ouologuem.

via NYR

“the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote” via Popova.

We must exercise and train in order to continue to progress, stay limber, exceed our limits, grow, reflect, and learn how to be fluid.

“… Now, under surveillance,

he needed to listen for words I couldn’t vocalize,
being a shade—to intuit what I could visualize

but not describe, and have faith I was there.”

Eurydice, Adrienne Su

When you appeared it was as if
magnets cleared the air.
I had never seen that smile before
or your hair, flying silver. Someone
waving goodbye, she was silver, too.
Of course you didn’t see me.
I called softly so you could choose
not to answer—then called again.
You turned in the light, your eyes
seeking your name.

Happenstance, Rita Dove

Yonamine‘s “It’s expensive to be poor”

Byen travay, byen swe
pa di byen touche
sou latè beni.

Good work, good sweat
doesn’t mean good pay
on this blessed earth,
on this blessed earth.

Lavi Vye Nèg