Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry (Emergent Strategy Series Book 6)

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Hipsters and entrepreneurs were complicated locusts. They ate up everything in sight, but they meant well.

Frantically, as humans do after an incident, they started checking themselves and telling the story of what had just happened.

She had outlived everyone she had ever loved and most of those she hated.

He gave her a hibiscus house when he couldn’t give her the fidelity she craved.

People of different elements can get caught in only seeing what is wrong with each other.

and we are not here to win but to experience love and those who do not know love are missing life in spite of all other accumulation

i know all of the harm intertwines at the root i know the medicine has to go deeper down to the core of existence to the cord between us and god to the fault lines between us that make us think: i can be without you

i would have loved you but my species we are terrified of love.

I came home, arms loaded with a number of unnecessary groceries that equaled the exact weight of my fear of being caught in a lie.

We can never teach how evil a thing is better than it will show us itself, with time.

Imagine how compelling love and pleasure have to be, to keep offering it to each other, keep letting it reconstruct our hearts, even after we have known grief?

remember you are water. of course, you leave salt trails. of course, you are crying. flow.

i can’t save anything only love it all so much

you are nothing pure except human. neither/so am i.

you are not in control, you are in collaboration.

you are the only one who will ever get to love yourself from the inside out.

“Death is like that too, perhaps. A boundary that allows for something real to happen inside the time we have left.”

They didn’t forgive this client—part of the work was showing white men that some things are unforgivable.

Na had a hopeless tendency, and it was met by the world more often than not.

When someone is trying to make you small, it is to busy themselves. Because if they aren’t shrinking you, reducing you, they will have to contend with themselves.

we have to be able to show other people when the systems that fill the hours of their lives are stripping them of dignity and agency. we have to be impolite and disruptive. we have to move in the dark, quietly, listening for each other’s heartbeats, learning as we go.

we will find a way to live here on this earth or she will blow us to the sky melt away our flaws leave only a perfect stone full of story

we remember that what grows and breathes is more valuable than ashes. we dream of losing greed like we lost our tails.

testing the abundant nature of love we pull the edges of our hearts so thin trying to cover the world from you

i am made of words but if paper is how you police us i say burn it all