What world is this,
my world, your world of wealthy thieves

holding the guns to your heads,
breaking your cervixes & bones

while the rest of us light our candles & buy lipsticks.
How is anything able to grow as we theorize about purity & rhetoric?

Italy, Israel, my United States
of blood-laws & carmine, always preserving,

always looking back into the faces of
“our fathers,” policing the map

of a mouthless land. In my countries of genocide,
I implicate myself & dullen on

these sneakers & these meats,
until I have filled my home

with this & that, & to my deaths
amass amass amass.

Aracelis Girmay (2016)

Things:

• I just finished up my first semester of an MFA program, which has been quite a complicated experience to say the least... In search for wisdom, I re-read this interview with Sheila Heti about writing programs and keep thinking about this quote: “I remember telling my grandmother about our isolation, and she said, ‘Have regular parties at your house.’ I think that’s how she and her mostly Jewish, communist, artist friends socialized back in Budapest. She told me what to do, and we did it, and she was right.” I think I’ll be taking this advice into the new year.

• Now that I’m done with classes, I’m very excited to spend time reading (for leisure)! Here are a few books on my winter TBR list: At the End of the World There Is a Pond by Steven Duong; Good Girl by Aria Aber; Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck; Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga; The Wedding by Dorothy West; Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte; Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys.