STAY TUNED
Hi all. I’m not going to sugar coat anything today.
At the time of writing this, I have a migraine. Felt it coming on yesterday. First one in months. First time I’m trying my new medication. Not sure how I’ll respond. Hope it cuts the edge off. Hope to be able to eat, think, find relief, feel human again soon. Hope I don’t feel worse.
Thought I could use this moment of haze to share some journal pages.
SPOTLIGHT
These are all still gestating.
One is a poem I’ve shared publicly, only slightly since tweaked.
One is so new to me, I’m not sure what to make of it.
The rest are hanging out in the doorway.
Waiting to enter or exit or just resting along the door jam, no where else to be.
SPARK
Based on lived experiences, Cicada is a New York love story exploring a LGBTQ+ relationship and personal traumas/healings. The two co-writers, Matthew Fifer & Sheldon D Brown, also played the main actors in this romantic drama.
The story was tender and engaging, enhanced further by the warm, candid film style.
STACKED
In A Movie, Courtney Bush presents us with a screen upon which we can view her virtuosic intelligence, pathos and wit, heart and ear in action. The result, A Movie, helps us understand that movies really are actually everything. I mean, really, everything! Movies are the magical invocations to a changed and better life. They’re also products of impromptu corporations’ intent on capitalizing upon our innermost signatures of feeling. They’re projected on the universe’s biggest screens and they’re on in the background while we’re doing something, anything, else. But above all, movies are things that we make, in the basement, in the classroom, in the studio and the streets. Like poetry they are the things we do with our friends. I left the theater of A Movie with wet and salty cheeks—tears of celebration of what this book has taught us and tears of gratitude for giving me the urgent feeling that I must immediately deliver my life kinetically into poetry—the highest compliment I can give.
—Brandon Brown, poet, translator, author of the Four Seasons—
Flag - Imani Elizabeth Jackson
You might hold native soil in the form of a stone thrown at a border tower, but how do you hold the tidewaters of Black diaspora and vitality? Flag moves with remembering's phase shifts: a flood that's also its watercycle's "intensity of rain," and a river that's sand, mud, and silt at its mouth. In Flag, the recursive bend gets all the precision of language normally reserved for something linear and unrelenting. Not all defiance looks the same. Flag gives me so much hope for poetry.
—Kimberly Alidio—
SEE YOU
Wishing y’all some excitement and relief this weekend!
-moki-
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