May 25, 2018
In Defense of Fast Girls Who Just Want to Dance
“We were free and naïve enough to believe we could navigate the terrain of men’s hunger and their hands unscathed.”
“We were free and naïve enough to believe we could navigate the terrain of men’s hunger and their hands unscathed.”
“Migraine is deceptive pain. It lies when it begins, and it lies about what it signifies. It signifies nothing.”
I needed those moments of tangible Native-ness, because I was never sure if I was Native enough.
It gives us license to try and pinpoint the moment our lives crashed and burned, when everything could have been different.
What if my son, the boy who has puzzled everyone, has helped to save my life?
To call these acts wild, to see them as separate parts of consciousness, is to be a tourist in your own city.
He attempted to have sex with me, and I managed to stop him by saying I had a tampon in, my period blood a greater deterrence than my protest.
His bluegrass band at the gravesite? Check. No embalming? Check.
“I feel like I’m hyperventilating. I can’t stop crying and I can’t breathe. I’m afraid I’m going to drown on dry land.”
Staying in contact with biological family no matter what they’ve done is a message beaten into us from every side.
I have been afraid most days of my life, which is what anxiety is, and the months of this pregnancy have been the most anxious of my life.
My feeding tube could make my life easier and better, but a visceral shame pulsed through me when it came to actually using it.
“What does it mean when your body is your art? Can a thicker brush not make just as beautiful strokes?”
“Blind and print-handicapped readers do not have the luxury of deciding whether they will go old-school and deny the digital age.”
“Does cursing beget being cursed? Had I brashly yielded a power unchecked, unaware of the consequences?”
The students turned a gray patch of earth into their own tiny Eden, a secret oasis of their own.
Mayfield’s style was as stark as Richard Wright and poetic as Ernest Hemingway, but was grounded in urban realism.
“Manson’s magical proximity to massacres of gun violence is, we know, not magical. His practice is prismatic, his lyrics a sieve.”
“I miss your record player, and the sense of home you carried with you, although you’d never really been at home anywhere.”
I never would have come to Korean if not for my adoption. The language pulled me back to it, despite the decades, cultures, and continents between us.
