After you left, the first book I read was Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. If you had turned a few pages in your Prose Poem Penguin Anthology, you too would have read her work. Dubious alignments such as these are like sunsets to the broken hearted; so given, so there, that we somehow betray their arbitrarity for substance, meaning, and wonder. This too I must remind myself: the sun sets not for you nor I. Coincidence blinks for no one but herself. 

Glitter to the mystique: it was a good book too. Almost prophetic in the way physicists search for elegance in a wild physics. Its prognostications, however suspect, were ultimately two fold, and those creasemarks line up nicely with its plot. The telos follows a coming of age story between two lovers. We shall call them Lover A (me) and Lover B (you). [The assignments will make sense in a moment if they don't already] 

Lover A falls for Lover B 

Lover B leaves 

The end. 

There we have it; the makings for a good book. What more could the reader have asked for? Now some of you might know that I am taking liberties here with my summary. So what? The effect I think is still good. But if it will curry your favor, what if I were to cull some quotes from the body of the text? This one in particularly I like:

“Photography is just a way of playing with perceptual relationships.” 

Indeed it felt like we were all just playing this past Saturday. Basir making jest at the ground, and I falling for it some four times, an even number. Mckayla and Destiny rising on the count of three, two birds with one stone. And Micah directing “pop the chest” as if that could undo a lifetime spent awkward in this body. These things all felt good and just on the eve of what was anything but. 

A woman I want to quote but am unsure if I am allowed to name, penned something close to perfection earlier that day when she said, “Violence, fear and cruelty are not the only truth.” 

Sitting in the shade of a building not ours, on a patch of green interrupted by flowers certain in their sky, Mohammed said to me, belief in the creator gives me purpose and makes this life easy. A truth indeed. 

Bertrand Russell said something moving when he observed this about the decline of religiosity and the rise of nihilisms, “To the sophisticated youth of the west all this ardour seems a trifle crude. He is firmly persuaded that having studied everything impartially, he has seen through everything and found that there is ‘nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon’” A long way of saying there is but one truth. It's tempting to look through this glory hole when an insipid white man gently says in passing, “I will never be ruled by Chinese imperialists.” An indicative remark launched through the logic of racial invective. I will never be ruled by Chinese imperialists. Claudia Rankine quotes Butler who says pejorative language becomes injurious because it makes a spectacle out of the subject’s addressability. It brings them into the world as a part of the world and thus, a thing available to injury. Fair enough. I happen to think it just has something to do with our shared truths. Pathologize whiteness! 

At the moment, I am not yet ready to accept any truth that is not already self evident. Brutality and terror being so top of mind, it superordinates and subordinates all of this processing. A second reading and meaning to “I’ve got Georgia on my mind.” But for those of you who are, I leave you with this gesture to the possible and tomorrow. The first from Tonya Foster, and second from Renee Gladmann. 

To truth. May there be more. 

“Yesterday swarms in 

the m/arrow of (y)our thoughts (,/.) as 

s/he has there (,) sleepless 

Yesterday swarms in 

To eat or not to? Then what?

She clears her throat”

“The news was discouraging. Yet I had to move. But, at least I could stay fat and scream all I wanted, which now I was doing, but into the palm of my hand. Beneath the noise was a sentence.”