Azzy

“Love between two people is up close, disheveled - a melange of past, present, future love and acrimony. And this is how I must love my mother. Love her the way I want her to love my father again.”
― Ivelisse Rodriguez, Love War Stories

“I've amazed myself with how well I've learned to live around her absence. This void is my constant companion, no matter what I do. Nothing will fill it, and it will never go away.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back into your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“I don't need an overseas enemy / I have a father”
― Nikki Giovanni