Eleesha Blakesley

“You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy required to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointment: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Did you win? he asks.
It wasn't a match, I say. It was a lesson.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Nobody notices, only you've known,

you're not sick, not crazy,
not angry, not sad--

It's just this, you're injured.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Refuse the old means of measurement.
Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen.
-From "Out West”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems