LOVER

1. If you are reading this, I know that you are lying.

   .

2. Aren’t we all? (lying?)

   in several small ways?

   .

3. I know that you get lost sometimes

   in the shoulds and the would haves and the could haves and the nearlys.

   I know some of your thoughts are shocking and pressing

   but you can’t bring them up in an interview or a board meeting

   or lunch with the family

   or on Tiktok

   or where you have to be sexy

   or when people say,

   “hiiiiiiiiii!!! how have you been???!!!!”

   .

4. I promise you. I feel it too. (the weight.) I’m there too. If you dared tell me the truth, you would have a friend. If I dared tell you the truth, we would be inseparable.

   .

5. We know this, perhaps. This is why we smile and say,

   “Fine! Fine! You?”

   .

6. I am always saying this,

   but I get my best clues from the weather,

   the wilderness outside. Nature teaches me how to be.

   As a writer

   and a lover,

   I like to work outside in. (Easier for an introvert).

   .

7. Sometimes you forget about your skills until you’re in bed.

   .

8. There are many hidden boons to writing. It is a litmus test for the soul, for all the cruelty happening under the skin. It is not a substitute for love, but it has its very own lovership. You go the page to work out the mean things and the knots and the deep deeps and the terrible.

   .

9. Sometimes a solution arrives, glistening in ink.

   .

10. Don’t take my word for it, though. I tell stories

dream/loving into being

my best friend loves me my best friend loves me

FiYiYi

Photos Jennifer Williams

Happy Mardi Gras, yall. Get you some spirit xox

Write down what you want. Often and without shame. In the black at 5 am these are the things that came

peace, everywhere.
food security, everywhere.
an earth that isn’t hurting.

*earth that does not hurt.

a mother. a mother.
awareness. big music.
dancing. family.
trees,
the trees.

health for everyone and everything;
rest for those who have not been able.
equity. parity. fairness.
transparency.

fewer screens,
more holding.

acceptance.
breath.
breath.
power to speak the truth,
and what comes,
whatever comes next.

life that does not kill the liver.
chance. accessibility.
active, surprising love.
help.

NO WAR

You still hold all the things you ever wanted to be, but for now you are a body in a bed, divided by impossible stairs from the life that still goes on below, a body on a bench, waiting to catch its breath, almost able to reach out and touch the life that continues an arm's length away, a body moving through the slow soup of time, waiting. Waiting -
.
.
.
#disability #chronicillness #longcovid #CFS #Fibromyalgia

We anarchists have this profound faith that human beings are capable of thinking and acting for themselves, and putting that self-determining impulse to good collective use, toward self-organized forms of freedom for all. Not that humans will necessarily, inevitably, or naturally do this. But without this belief that it’s a possibility—or one could say, a potentiality within humans—anarchism makes almost no sense. 

Still, there are times, violent and vicious, that shake our faith to its core, like much of this pandemic era, when it’s been too easy to slip into a rage at individuals and then whole categories of them (well placed as that rage may be), and from there feel despair about what humans as a species have done to this world. 

We anarchists can be an impatient bunch, though—wanting others to see what is so self-evident to us, through our lens, and think and act sooner, now. There is, after all, a lot at stake. 

Perhaps more than impatience, there’s this imperative we feel so keenly: Why should more people have to suffer and die? Why does it too often take someone themselves feeling a cop’s baton at a demo, or someone themselves having a boss or school board that cares little for their health and well-being as long as the grocery or school stays open? 

That, alas, is a tension within our faith; learning to do-it-ourselves might entail first learning lessons for oneself the hard way. 

So we anarchists need to be all that much more giving when people do reach a point of thinking and acting for themselves—whether they sport a circle-A or not. We know the trauma it too frequently takes to “get here.” And suddenly it seems, there are many, many anarchistic humans who are now there—walking out of their schools, staging strikes at their workplaces, organizing solidarity sickouts, and even if still embryonic, refusing to return, whether to the old or now new normal, instead turning toward forms of collective and autonomous care, and toward freedom. 

Our faith, my anarchist friends, needs to burn brighter again, so those who are rising up in greater, bolder, and braver numbers can find warmth and aid in our solidarity.