Kindle Notes & Highlights
every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words since it often stifles the voice itself
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Love, how to tell you, this was constant: apocalypse a missing tooth my mind’s tongue ran to.
over. I’d once been a child who made ghosts too real for friends, had spent a life sharpening the blade of my imagination until it could sculpt any substance, quickly whittle back what is into its truest form. With what was undoing, undone, I had made myself a body. I tried, whispering to myself: we will begin human history again. It quieted no fears. The dreams nibbled at the places in my flesh that looked like grass.
They said: from a tree had come our exile. In my mind, death was a forest burned to ground. Carbon dug from earth started the blaze. I believed
Rest in the crucible of anxiety. It will destroy you. It will transform you. What I know has died inside me to make bone.
If the cotton was white and the plantation owners were white and the historians were white and the paper was white: then the violence bleaches into its backdrop: like the blood spilled in Helen’s red cloth that is red: What was it for her to hold not bow or sword but needle?:
When the piñata stops rolling in the tree, she will be left with the shreds of our country
Daughter, you came to in a culture with just one metaphor. The god sacrificed his only son. The kings sacrificed daughters to dragons or a neighboring enemy’s bed.
