A. Tony Jerome @wenotfreeyet@youdeserve.space

"I never forgot it because I asked Joy Harjo what she did with the anger. The panel talked about all kinds of unconscionable harm done to Indigenous people. I said, “What do you do with the anger?” And she said, “You have to transmute it because it will harm you and not whoever who’s harming you." (2/2)

~Khadijah Queen

"It’s impossible to live with it. The only thing I feel that can be done is to transmute it into action and to keep doing it. Making action a habit. Whatever you are capable of doing. In 2011, I went to this panel called “Native Innovation” at Poets House in New York.” (1/2)

~Khadija Queen

"Not whether you feel positive, negative, or neutral about somebody’s house décor, for example. I’m talking about things that really matter to life and death survival. It’s like in a debate. You can’t be neutral about children in cages at the border. That’s a crock of shit." (2/2)

~Khadijah Queen

"Well, I just don’t understand the pretense. You know you have a feeling. And if you don’t, well, how terrifying is it to not have a feeling about something? I don’t mean it in a way that says anything about folks who are neurodiverse, where they feel neutral towards something. I’m talking about neutrality in terms of an action required for survival, someone else’s care or wellbeing, or the state of the world. Those kinds of things." (1/2)

~Khadijah Queen

" [...] So if we can articulate our feelings without harming other people physically, we are closer to being human. And we’re not putting on this artifice of objectivity or being the middle. Fuck neutrality. That’s why we’re in the shit we’re in now. " (2/2)

~Khadijah Queen

"Like, why is clarity difficult? Why is truth difficult? I will never understand that. I don’t like tiptoeing around shit. I don’t like objectivity. Fuck objectivity. Where’s the passion behind it? You will find the clarity there. In Lucretius’ The Nature of Things there is this admonition to be moderate, not passionate. I think it’s because many people who are unevolved use anger and negative feeling—non-generative/destructive feeling—to rule their behavior, (1/2)

~Khadijah Queen

"So I will try my best. I do get it wrong, but I do try. So what I could say about resilience is that, well, if you want to have any, poetry is a good idea. If you intend to survive or even do better than survive in this completely bullshit situation, poetry would be a good idea."(2/2)

~Ariana Reines

"I read and I write because I’m hungry and I’m starving and my soul needs to live. That’s what I do. That’s what I do this for. I get irritated because it turns into something else. Everything about this world is a deforming and confusing situation, it often seems. And yet, we have this access to the absolute and we do what we can with that access." (1/2)

~Ariana Reines

"One of the things I fantasize about this conversation doing is to show love. I want to show up by giving love. That’s one of my ambitions for what this will become. It will become three minutes in somebody’s life on their phone in a month or two. I just feel like that hasn’t been modeled enough. I can’t hear it and see it enough."

~Ariana Reines

"I don’t want to be resilient. When you live in a body that is under attack, you don’t want to be congratulated for resilience. You would rather somebody recognize how fucked up it is. It’s not that the work is good or that you are good or great or beautiful or whatever because of that resilience, but despite it. Because resilience is costly."

~Khadijah Queen

ITS THIS PART THIS IS THE PART

AR: [...] “If you sit with it too long, you can’t.” You’ll explode. You gotta go, you gotta move. I love the way this book moves through forms, moves through tones and modes and spaces and places. It gets funny and exalting and devastating, but it stays moving.

KQ: That’s how you stay alive."

BRUH COME ON

"[...]That’s the surface depiction of it. Motherhood is hardcore. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do and it’s not valued, which makes it harder. They give you lip service and a day of flowers, but are they going to help you with childcare? Are they going to help you with housing? Are they going to make the schools safe to attend? That’s how you show that you value mothers. Not because you gave them a box of something shiny on Mother’s Day."

~Khadijah Queen

"Well see, that’s another thing. We have to not police other people’s existence."

~Khadijah Queen

AR: Not only are we remembering somebody else’s stuff— which is what museums, archives, galleries used to be a pleasure for— but our own lives are like that now.

KQ: Yes. And we’re watching ourselves lose it all.

AR: We are.

KQ: And what are we doing about it?

AR: We don’t know what to do. Yeah, I want to start crying.

KQ: I know. If you sit with it it’s too devastating. I think that’s why I have that line in “Erosion”: “how we fail is how we continue.”

~https://believermag.com/logger/an-interview-with-khadijah-queen/

"And so you did. You found a way to. I think some very science fiction-y things are happening."

~Ariana Reines

"Because it’s endless. We can’t see the other side of it because it’s still happening. [...] So what you do to continue is the routine stuff. For poets, that’s returning to language. As a person, it could just be trying to feed yourself and get enough sleep and checking in on people that you love. And, I don’t know, watching your favorite terrible show."

~Khadijah Queen

"Intention in the saying and in the planning, certainly, but infinite freedom to adjust with the arc of my imagination, even within the constraint of page or poem or language or book or body, and in whatever body you have, the vibrating motion of existence, articulating that loving and difficult and complicated and gorgeous experience of being alive.

But also: I’m not free unless everybody’s free."

~Khadijah Queen

"Well, I felt her spirit near as I read you."

~Ariana Reines

"I want to talk [...] but only if you want to."

~Ariana Reines