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I believe I was trying to remind myself of how it had felt to be wordless, completely of the physical world–that even before my body was an instrument for language it had been an instrument for memory.

Sarah Manguso, from Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf Press, 2015)

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Stopped counting. Methylphenidate high just for myself. Energy that is not love, nor anxiety, not joy nor hope--maybe just intimate pride. 

Want to limit telling people how good they are, disrupt borders of expectation. Here I am, there I go. We know where we went. It’s ok to forget. This is how I let go.

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POPPING. BIG. BOTTLES TONIGHT. @ WARSAN SHIRE

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Clever Octopus Makes a Daring Aquarium Escape Through a Drainpipe Leading to the Ocean

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In graduate school, I don’t know how to measure my blackness beyond the marks I make on the page. Those marks are black pixels, the smallest physical points I perceive on my screen. But I feel it, my blackness, livid and living. The word afro appears in a poem and my professor suggests I delete it. He asks: Who are you really addressing, in that moment? And: Is this a political poem? It feels, to him, like a trick. As if I’ve drawn a silver coin from behind his ear. The poem changes when marked by my blackness, I learn. My readership splits, and some leave me. I imagine my readers gathering their coats, turning up their collars against the single raindrop released by the stormcloud of my blackness in a poem. I don’t delete anything. I write two books of poems.

Kiki Petrosino, “Literacy Narrative,” published in the Iowa Review (via bostonpoetryslam)

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Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc….but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.

David Foster Wallace,

Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama

(via

mindfuckmath

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Harvard’s Colorful Library Filled With 2,500 Pigments Collected form Around the World

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Katherine Bernhardt, Duracell, Cantaloupe, Doritos, Toilet Paper, 2015 Acrylic and spray paint on canvas 96 × 120 in 243.84 × 304.8 cm

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green anemone (Anthopleura xanthogrammica)

San Mateo county CA Jan. 2015 / ZS25 /

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i like you so much but everything hurts and i am too tired to try

i like you so much but i know you don’t owe me anything

i like you so much but whiteness is an infection that forces amputation and i don’t know how much more i can cut out

i like you so much but it’s only because you like green tea ice cream and podcasts in bed and sitting on floors in bookstores and the transitive property is real

i like you so much but i am sad all the time

i like you so much but so do my friends and when was the last time that happened 

i like you so much but you are kind of a jerk

i like you so much but only because i think i could be like you if i was better

i like you so much but i am crazy and self-medicating and everything i loathe in this one body

i like you so much but you didn’t reach for my hand

i like you so much but you made me realize that i like pork and that’s a big culinary step for me so please slow down

i like you so much but i can’t keep pace

i like you so much but i am not good at holding distance and space and time and knowing the difference between the three

i like you so much but i don’t even know you

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Lady in a Sari - Jamini Roy - 1950-60 - Lahiri Collection

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The Motown family. The Supremes, The Marvelettes, Brenda Holloway Kim Weston, Bobby Rogers of The Miracles, Stevie Wonder and Berry Gordy on the Piano, 1964