Sheila

“the leather strap the broom the switch
habits before freedom
freedom: the lie which is true
before: kept fed but close to death

the penitentiary the gun the rope
is at hand now that you free
free: kept down with your eyes down
now: night riders patrol in cars

those born again die free
a lie for grateful slaves
grateful: who are better off
lie: who is better off

dig down into the unmarked earth
lay there and be free”
― Chanelle Benz, The Gone Dead

“The deaths of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of twenty years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don’t matter with the deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person’s life is more important than another’s. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person’s death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“I'm not a god in the traditional fashion, I am a patron. Patrons have responsibilities. Granted, I rarely have the opportunity to exercise them.”
― Steven Erikson, House of Chains

“After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir