Black excellence

Source

Jennifer Packer

Say Her Name

And Dreaming

For James III

Graces

 Yellow Roses

From Goethe's Venetian Epigrams

I fell in love as a boy with a puppet show;

it attracted me for a long time until I destroyed it.

Peter Beste

From his "Houston Rap" series.

"I'm not going to let you go so soon, and so embarrassingly soft."

I read a tweet earlier today that made me seek out a Nina Simone performance I'd never seen, which wrecked me, of course. "I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that."

Somewhere someone

"Is it enough...[t]hat we think of him sometimes/Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?"

Carl Phillips, "Steeple"

Maybe love really does mean the submission of power—
I don’t know. Like pears on a branch, a shaking branch,
in sunlight, 4 o’clock sunlight, all the ways we do harm,
or refrain from it, when nothing says we have to.... Shining,
everyone shining like that, as if reality itself depended
on a nakedness as naked as naked gets; on a faith in each
other as mistaken as mistaken tends to be, though I have
loved the mistake of it—still do; even now—as I love
the sluggishness with which, like ceremony or, not much
different, any man who, having seen himself at last,
turns at first away—has to—the folded black and copper
wings of history begin their deep unfolding, the bird itself,
shuddering, lifts up into the half-wind that comes after—
higher—soon desire will resemble most that smaller thing,
late affection, then the memory of it; and then nothing at all.