Carmen

“Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

“For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson - that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest