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I know that the problems in the hood are systemic.
I always wondered what would happen if the white people didn’t all get off at 96th street. Would it make my commute home to the hood easier? Would the MTA give any more of damn?
When boys talked, it sounded like feral dogs barking. They fiended for attention, were always aggressive, and made me wish I
could put them down.
We lived loud and hard against a neighborhood built to contain us. We moved like the earth pushing its way through cement sidewalks.
With fluorescent lights above me, stained white tiles under my feet, and a circle of machismo incarnate around me, where was the space to run?
“You are what you are, Juliet. You are my blood, my first-born granddaughter. I love you like the seas love the moon,” Grandma Petalda said, pulling me into her soft belly. “You will be back. This is your home. Now, go say goodbye to your mother.”
the bochinche plague.
Men can’t handle seeing those things. It makes them crazy. Remember, they’re just not as smart as we are, mama.
Speaking about men this way sets up J for her distrust in them. I feel like these sentiments ring true for many qwoc
“I bet you’re not even really gay. You’re just feeling trendy because you’re going to a liberal arts college.”
What a piece of shit
ready to fight.
Thats right!
who doesn’t love a little dig through salvation?
bastion
“You know your Titi Penny had a lady friend once and she was very nice. This was right before she met your Uncle Lenny. We didn’t talk about those things back then, but I knew. I could tell by the way she looked at her that it was different than just being friends. I’ve seen you look at Lainie the
same way.” Her words made my legs weak. I pressed my back against the nearest wall and slid into a sitting position. “You knew about me and Lainie?” I asked, hand on my inhaler. “I’m your mother, Juliet. It’s my job to know everything about you,” she said. “But it worries me. I’m not happy with it. I don’t understand. I didn’t understand with Titi Penny either. But I’m sure it’s a phase, just like it was with her.”
Sleater Kinney.
My God and
my understanding of God is cente...
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am as a person and what I need to continue my connecti...
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Bible stories that painted women as untrustworthy or whore-ish always seemed off to me. Like, what did those messages have to do with God’s love anyway?
Sophia is the feminine representation of the wisdom of God.
The Ladies Gallery
Was I not worth an Aaliyah-style four-page letter?
I understood “microaggressions” to mean “little bullshit acts of racism.”
“The thing is, Juliet, I’ve never appreciated someone else’s unrequested guidance on my identity. I don’t want their interpretation of who I am or where they think my politics should lie.
My Blackness, my queerness, my theological inclinations, what I’m like at a family reunion, who I am in the classroom or in a relationship, all of that is mine,”
And many of us move in this world with the beauty and courage to write our stories on the backs of napkins and at the edges of our sanity so that others may find strength in our words and know that our lives belong to us,
I will always be awed by women who are strong enough to walk down the damn street.
the importance of naming racism when it comes for you unexpectedly in the form of a mentor, a lover, or someone who exists in the gray areas.
Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.
How could anything as huge as feminism be universal?
‘Reading would make me brilliant, but writing would make me infinite.’”
Portland Queer: Tales from the Rose City.
