Jamaal May > Quotes

“I need your teeth in me, slow and vicious, to tell me my armor is just skin, bones, only bones.”
― Jamaal May, The Whetting of Teeth

“You are quarter ghost on your mother’s side.
Your heart is a flayed peach in a bone box.
Your hair comes away in clumps like cheap fabric wet.
A reflecting pool gathers around your altar
of plywood sub flooring and split wooden slats.
You are rag doll prone. You are contort,
angle and arc. Here you rot. Here
you are a greening abdomen, slipping skin,
flesh fly, carrion beetles.
This is where bullets take shelter,
where scythes find their function, breath loses
its place on the page. This is where the page is torn
out of every book before chapter’s close,
this is slippage, this is a shroud of neglect
pulled over the body, this
is your chance to escape.
Little wraith,
bend light around your skin until it colors you clear,
disappear like silica in a kiln, become
glass and glass beads, become
the staggered whir of an exhaust fan:
something only noticed
when gone. Become
an origami swan. Fold yourself smaller
than ever before. Become less. More
in some ways but less
in the way a famine is less. They will
forgive you for not being satisfied
with fitting in their hands.
They will forgive you
for dying to be
a bird diminutive enough
to fit in a mouth and not be crushed.”
― Jamaal May

“I kept fiddling with my phone through dinner
because I was fascinated
that every time I tried to type love,
I missed the o and hit i instead.
I live you is a mistake I make so often,
I wonder if it’s not
what I’ve been really meaning to say.”
― Jamaal May, Hum

“I write because I love you enough
to ask for what is terrible: run farther
than your feet can possibly carry your heart.
I love you enough to confess that you will fail
but fail closer to the finish line
than if you lie down when the start guns fires.
And in this way, you will never fail
to be an arch, stepping-stone, bridge
of bone and intellect,
of guts and song. Look
how lively the children step.

Let's nod our heads to their footfalls.
Become backbeat with me
and they will sing the harmonics
we forgot to learn.

Tell me you wouldn't die for that.

Tell me you will live for this.”
― Jamaal May, The Big Book of Exit Strategies

“Be carved until the end of you is a wedge -
you already know the precision it takes
to fit well enough not to be dislodged”
― Jamaal May, Hum

“...I don't know
if it's better to be good at a bad job or bad at a good job,
but there must be some kind of satisfaction
in doing a job so poorly, you are never asked to do it again.
...
I learned that I'd work any job this hard, ache
like this to know that I could always ache for something.
There's a hell for people like us
where we shovel the coal we have mined ourselves
into furnaces that burn the flesh from our bones
nightly, and we never miss a shift.”
― Jamaal May, The Big Book of Exit Strategies

“She's not "maternal", she's dangerous”
― Jamaal May, Hum