What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

Then there’s the notion of the “perfect boyfriend.” A woman knows where he is at all times and knows he’s thinking about her.

That sounds like the worst kind of boyfriend. I don’t want to have to know where a person is at all times. I’m being stalked by crazy people. they’re crazy but then I see things like this.

Death and pleasure we experience asymptotically. We spend much time working upward on the slope, and most people only sometimes approach the lines of pure pleasure or death, close enough to touch. Maybe once or twice in a lifetime, for each.

Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.

When it was done, and the fridge was filled with vibrant colors and smelled of Lysol,

This writer says things that are so strange to me.

Above and beyond the formal qualities that induced the quality of taste, thinking grasped by the sublime feeling is faced, “in” nature, with quantities capable only of suggesting a magnitude or a force that exceeds its power of presentation. This

The truth is that motherhood is stained with blood, tainted with suffering and the potential for tragedy.

I’d written in a note to another book about how I saw an exhibit at lacma that had African sculptures that represented motherhood. They were so different from western people’s ideas of motherhood. I’m looking for the book with the note.

This thought was foremost in my mind when watching Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in 2008.

I called my Dad when I got home from my evening class that night. We watched tv. When they called the election for Obama, my Dad was quiet. He tried to speak but he was crying. He said he never thought he’d see the dat that a black man was president of this country. He was so happy. I was crying too. I felt that way during the primaries when I was a huge supporter of John Edwards. But when I heard my dad cry