I’LL WRITE THE HYPOSTASIS OF BECKY AND KAREN, I thought, but then a stalker showed up at my house, and I was overworked, but I had to deal with that, and think on things I never think on, for example my own safety, for example my own protection. Zoom swelled like a buboe and popped. The stalker had driven from Michigan to deliver a mug to me, he said, to thank me for having written my last book, showed up on my back porch and wouldn’t leave.
I can’t write about the fact that the partner of a new student of mine was shot by white supremacists four days ago. I thought I might manage to write about what James Baldwin says to a twenty-eight-year-old Nikki Giovanni in this video, which has been mother father lover brother and best friend to me these last ten days, because there are about seventy things that pass between these two writers here that will tell you just about everything you need to know about art, time, race in America, and what’s really wrong with whites.
Except that no one source can do that, and the main thing I can say, if there is a main thing, is defund the police, abolition now, and how magnificent it is that everything can change. Is changing.
But I’m sick over Rayshard Brooks, how each new act of state terror or state-sanctioned lynching puts a new name in our mouths, and we grow familiar with the contours of that sound, what can be retrieved of their lives, this sickening, nauseating familiarity on whose surface no one wants to allow a film to form. It’s terrorism. It harms everyone. The long unbroken onslaught of it eroded our whole soul and I’m using a we that disgusts me with how much I still long for it—was that longing built into me?—an American we. The state murder and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people is mass terror. It accomplished a kind of generalized brain damage that—in the mother of all Gemini seasons—masses of people really did start to wake up and recover from.
My earlier metaphor, the one I proposed in March, as Covid set in, was birth. (I was talking a lot about death too.) We are witnessing the exhilarating and also fucking annoying process of people genuinely changing their hearts and minds. It is happening in the midst of metastasizing state violence and more and more murder, but the spiritual emotional physical intellectual process of a true change of heart and a true change in mind, on a mass level—this cannot and will not be canceled. The wave is moving. It is underway. And this week amid the density of death, obnoxiousness, rebirth, and ricochets, came protections DACA and workplace equity for LGBTQIA people, waves that felt like miracles, given the conservative makeup of the Supreme Court—but the fact is miracles are made by activists. All the old theologies are nothing compared to the real transformation, heart, soul, body, and policy, that people are making with our hands, with our feet, with our money, with our bodies.
In that video I mentioned, Baldwin tells Giovanni that the greatest danger for Black people in America isn’t that they won’t win the country they and their ancestors built. He says the greatest danger to Black people in America is that they will, like whites, forget how to love their children.
I tried writing about lynching and terrorism, being in the streets with elderly ladies, mutual aid, the absurdity of my current love life etc, but the fact is I’m a white Jewish woman whose parents forgot how to love me, and what Baldwin says to young Giovanni cut me deep in the heart. My parents went insane, they forgot how to be Jewish, they forgot how to love me, they forgot how to love. I’ve written about this for these pages before. I’m mentioning it now because this whole damn thing is about love. If America, where 53 percent of white women voted for 45 the last time around, where murder and dismemberment are more acceptable to show on screens than love, care, and affection—if we could ever learn to love, to care, on a structural level—now that would be something the world has never seen. The supreme court ruling this week gave me hope. A lot else gives me hope besides.
I thought I’d give you a few pages from my notebook, in honor of the solstice, which I haven’t been able to speak to, in place of all the of the things I haven’t been able to say. And one poem from A Sand Book that Emily Dickinson wrote for me. Emily Dickinson knew about guns. She knew about bullets and she knew about the human heart. You’ll see what I mean.
Ariana Reines is a poet. A Sand Book (2019) won the Kingsley Tufts Award and will be released next month in the UK.
Marine wind
Roses looking at the ground
Mashed peonies
Sirens
Two wizening loquat leaves from J
Drying on the Mustang dashboard
Mustang in the rain
Pollen-dusted
Waris who wasn’t Waris entraining me into two hours of sexts
My therapist sent me a poem she wrote
A major breach of boundaries
“A” came in less than thirty seconds twice
I could not resist mocking him
Now I feel guilty
J and I aren’t speaking
K is about to enter the National Guard
The National Guard have been withdrawn from Boston
He was a Navy medic in Afghanistan
Massaging our conversation toward convincing him
To become a street medic in protests is that a form of activism
The president has scheduled his rally for the solstice
One day after Juneteenth
In Tulsa
I have been trying to get through to some Jews
I have been in a Tulsa of the mind with seventy-
Odd people and Joe Brainard for weeks
I feel a little sick
Went to the store for cereal
Which I never eat
Now I am eating it
In my peculiar prism
I almost typed prison
Prison is not a metaphor
I didn’t type prison
One throw of the dice shall never abolish
Chance
***
I’ve been thinking about the silence of Maya Angelou
When she was a little girl
After her rapist was found dead
The voice that splits the heart
It was the power of her own voice she said she feared
And what a voice it was
As for me I only got tired of talking
Tired of the sound of lies, not that I was telling any
What I mean is I was maybe even tired of the sound of the truth, slavered over
By a thousand minds, like a rock washed
& rewashed, drowned & undrowned
By polluted, mineral waves
Shining, perseverant, in its being-worn-away
Tired of my talent
And its wound, around which
I could not produce language
Only a vacuum, a kind of witness
A kind of wetness, a kind of whiteness
To where in me the iniquities of my culture
Had not only cut me, but extracted my complicity
And when a heart beats for and against itself
The voice is unlikely to rise
And if a voice does yet rise
Beyond that contradiction
Toward a continuity with things as smoke bluely
Makes itself like the tops of the trees. . . . .
***
If you ever had the misfortune to come upon
An old photograph of me you would have seen
A child and eventually a person generally in the act
Of trying to swallow her own soul, and, occasionally
A woman-shaped thing from whose body the soul
Had been entirely evacuated. Depending on how
The picture was composed you might even be able to glimpse
It—that soul—hovering somewhere above and to the left
Of my bead. It was not that I was not living
Sensitively. It was not that I was not living consciously.
It was only that I was traveling so much, and carrying
Around a broken heart, buttressing it almost centripetally
With winds and arms, eyelashes and never overfamiliar
Voices moaning in my ear, I didn’t realize the motion
I was making would produce a wind with the power
To blow my essence out of me. Not far out
Mind you. Just a little ways. Just far enough
That I missed it. Just far enough that if you saw me
Even two or three years ago, and were discerning,
You might have noticed.
***
It wasn’t that I was ever cherished that way.
But I had been cherished enough I could study
The good love like that had done you. I watched
How you shone, and I watched the generosity
And radiance you shook from yourself like particles of gold
Since when do I employ such similes? Are these Ancient
Times? Is this Ancient Times yet? What I am trying to say is I studied
Love’s effects by parsing the light you gave. And it was into
That light I was moving when others first took me
For one of the lucky ones
***
I’m too tired to read the book on how to be a woman like me
In any case I had to write that book
Now I want someone to come here and finish my work for me
I found out I have the same birthday as Maloney
Similar hair too, different body
I wasted my beauty and youth on ancient grief
And spent the last six months fucking men ten years younger than me
For no other purpose but to write about it
But that’s a lie
For no other purpose but the joy of it
But that’s a lie too
For no other purpose but my curiosity
Getting closer to the truth now
I’m thinking the hairless deodorized virtue of the purveyors of shame won’t work for me
I’m thinking beauty-wise, I’m aiming to peak at fifty
***
For two days Instagram was all beautifully designed
Defund the Police infographics
It really felt like progress
The beginning of social media being employed for an actual goodness
Fundraisers by artist friends
Then came ads featuring some kind of suctioning device that I guess makes white women’s lips bigger
I’m a white woman with lips they are advertising me this
Blacker lips for woke white women or just white women more generally
The rudiments and integuments of envy
Are like a woods in an old poem, Dante
Or Hawthorne, what you get lost in
Karen and Becky, a medium ok Jewish lady
The legislation of love using language primed on war and money
***
11/22
A bullet’s like a planet
Orbiting the brain
No heart will go unpunished
Tho it never enter in
For tho it didn’t enter
Tho it did & does & shall
For tho we only saw it
It is moving through us still
