Ashley Husemoller’s Reviews > Martyr! > Status Update

And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of *there* from entering *here*. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,“ said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

He read once about a Sufi prayer that went, “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

Tattoo idea???

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power — a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge, pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome, mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

One day I will be only gently and barely dead

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

We invented it, this language […] where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.

I am setting out to write a book of elegies for people I’ve never met. Yes, there is an unforgivable hubris in my imagining any part of their living, and presuming to write about it. There is also hubris in writing about anything else.

FIRST LINE: Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over.