Lauren

“The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. You have a name, and someone wants to call it. Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. If we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.”
― Warsan Shire

“You know, they say that there is a part
of the human chest that it you strike it hard enough,
it makes the person’s heart explode. This sounds like
such a lie that I have to believe it’s the truth. If I were
science, I’d never tell anyone where this place is.
If I were science, I’d have named this place after you.”
― Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

“Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men, who look like my father pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth