Jessica > Recent Status Updates

A poor choice, perhaps, when one is in pre-mourning for a beloved and perfectly-stocked kitchen.

Reading letters is...boring. But almost done!

I must admit, I find these stories almost impossibly claustrophobic to read, like Alabama has gotten its tentacles back into me.

This is a MASTERCLASS in turning an interesting life into a very boring book

I do wonder why I make these choices.

Mosses have a covenant with change; their destiny is linked to the vagaries of rain. They shrink and shrivel while carefully laying the groundwork of their own renewal. They give me faith.

All of them alike, expensive girls, the leaden friends / one used to play the piano, one of them once wrote a sonnet, / one even seemed awakened enough to photograph wheatfields— / the dull girls with the educated minds and technical passions

This is the work that knots one generation to the next, that constitutes and preserves a species. What is tied together is not “the past” and “the future” as abstract temporal horizons, but real embodied generations—ancestors and descendants—in rich but imperfect relationships of inheritance, nourishment, and care.

In 1938 MR wrote a book-length poem about a mining town in which all of the men were dying of silicosis. These memories live in my own bones; these poems break my heart.

What do you want—a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.

The names we use for rocks and other beings depends on our perspective, whether we are speaking from the inside or the outside of the circle. The name on our lips reveals the knowledge we have of each other...The names we give ourselves are a powerful form of self-determination, of declaring ourselves sovereign territory. Outside the circle, scientific names for mosses may suffice, but...what do they call themselves?

What is lost when a species...passes from the world? What does this loss mean within the...community in which it occurs: a community of humans and nonhumans, of the living and the dead? How might we think through the complex place of human life at this time: simultaneously, a/ the central cause of these extinctions; an agent of conservation; and organisms...exposed to the precariousness of changing environments?

"In town, the munitions plant has been poor since the war,
And nothing but war will make it rich again."
Holy, holy, holy sings the church next door.

"Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control."

"Transform yourself to transform the world. This doesn't mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet."

“And now I have become obsessed with how we can be movements like flocks of birds, underground power like whispering mushrooms, the seashell representation of a galactic vision for justice—small patterns that avoid useless predation, spread lessons, and proliferate change.”

“We can be mad,” Jabari said. “But we can be other stuff, too.”

We both looked at Jabari and waited for him to say more. I was finally understanding, for all that bouncy talk of ignorance and how they didn’t really know, that white folk, especially grown white folk, knew exactly what they were doing. And if they didn’t, they should have.

“We can be mad,” Jabari said. “But we can be other stuff, too.”

We both looked at Jabari and waited for him to say more. I was finally understanding, for all that bouncy talk of ignorance and how they didn’t really know, that white folk, especially grown white folk, knew exactly what they were doing. And if they didn’t, they should have.