1. Jammie Holmes. Photo by Azim Ohm.
Large black capital letters being pulled across the sky by an airplane say “They’re going to kill me.” The sky is cloudy with a strip of blue at the bottom.2. The Book of Life.
“It isn’t always easy to worry about whether or not one might be good. It’s painful to have to be aware of how often one might have benefitted from unfair advantages, how often one might have been impatient or intemperate, malign or thoughtless. Then again, it is only through such arduous doubts that one can keep any sort of check on one’s vanity and aggression and render oneself appropriately thoughtful and gentle.”3. Boston Arts for Black Lives.
“This is not a call to reform historically white and white-dominant museums; this is a call to unmake them. The reformist posture is one that applies weak-willed amendments onto structurally inequitable systems; unmaking such structures requires a confrontation with the holding of power itself. As artists and arts workers, we, the undersigned, demand the following measures for the unmaking of power and exclusionary practices as necessary first steps for all historically white and white-dominant arts and cultural institutions in Boston.”4. Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
“That said, poetry is a type of archeology, and archeology without history is blindness to what’s before you.”5. Kristen Simmons.
“In a porous relationality—attuning to how others (cannot) breathe, our haptics are enhanced and we develop capacities to feel one another otherwise. Choy (2011) reminds us of the Latin root of conspire, as a breathing together, declaring: ‘Breathers of the world, conspire!’ We need to conspire to strategize logics of agitation, which displace and unsettle. Doing so calls us not to ignore difference, but to create alter-relations with one another. As Choy underscores elsewhere, ‘breathing together rarely means breathing the same.’ What would it take for individuals to reconceptualize the embeddedness in which we all already are with and have the potential to be for—to stage the grounds for a collective reimagining, a conspiration, an atmospheric otherwise?”6. Abdullah Al-Baradouni.
“How do I call the dead now that between us are hushed / dirt and grave? I am surrounded by mute soil and a mausoleum. // Howling is only for widows and I am not / like a widow who wails on the silent casket.”
