I didn’t know how a child was supposed to grieve, and no one told me.

I’m more interested in solidarity, even if I don’t quite yet know myself what I mean by it, just the feeling I get from it—the startling, quenching relief of it; the force of its surprise, like being loved.

who’d have thought that explosion of joy would end five years later in the most absurd butchery . . .

At my high school there was a sign that said: “The world belongs to those who read.” That’s a lie, I thought, a lie, a lie, a lie.

she copies down sentences that tell one how to live, which have the undeniable weight of truth because they come from books

They say willingness is what one needs to succeed. They say one needs to succeed.

Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room. He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life, that’s how we bring Dad back.

I care for Henrietta Lacks and all the names whispered in my ear by the live oak trees. I don’t care about the father of modern gynecology, honored on South Carolina’s golf course capitol.

Because this mess I made I made with love. Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured. Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.

I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.

I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.

E, for empire—a thing to impale, kill, break
Breach.

I crave a ferry to San Francisco and a dead phone full of messages.

I could not lay down the grief I carried, but I could name it for what it was, and by naming it ease the burden…

…the blueprint for building a worthwhile, authentic life already exists within you.

To enact an existence that is always love and resistance demands of us a deliberate and conscious decision to find joy – not away from the fight, but in the fucking fight.

Wait. Wait and see. The world is not always cruel.

Mind filled, emptied, filled again with brilliant things I’d write if only I were brilliant.

The further away I am from Australia, the more work I have to do to explain the geographical situation of the place I grew up in.