Sensitive Topics Quotes

“Today
someone asks

why I am writing
about race. I look up

at the ceiling’s false sky
tulled shapes, fatal as hope

I have, I say, a gentle answer

and a tough. Which
do you want. My head’s
already hurting
with memory, like

the time I called
by his first name, my professor
who was black

or when someone asked
about my poems, if I would do

the dialect

He chooses
tough. And I say, Actually, that one

you have to learn
for yourself.”
― Ailish Hopper, Dark~Sky Society