DFZ

“She rubbed the skin off your headstone of a sternum and painted a sad picture of herself in your eyes. We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow.

She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.

They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.”
― James Curcio, Party at the World’s End

“You told me that one of the reasons you couldn't be with me was that you were afraid of my relationship with death, of the responsibility of keeping me alive.

I found that incredibly insulting. No one asked you to keep me alive. No one asked you to be a ventilator, a pair of hands desperate against my sternum, a series of gasping breaths into a slack mouth. You're not qualified. No one is qualified. I am not a person who thinks that anyone is coming to save me except myself. I have been dying my whole life, don't you understand, flirting with death, bargaining, stalling, shifting strategies to stay alive. I am the person who is best at keeping myself alive, there is no singular love responsible for me, there is no one who knows me deeper, you would make a useless life jacket. You will never be better at it than I am. All I wanted was someone for the loneliness, someone to hold my hand and sit in the dark with me.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

“It wasn't my first mutilation, but it was one of my best.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

“Don’t you know that slavery was outlawed?”
“No,” the guard said, “you’re wrong. Slavery was outlawed with the exception of prisons. Slavery is legal in prisons.”
I looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and Third World people, why so many Black people can’t find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to work, they beat you up and throw you in a hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions… Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren’t planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography