Ruth Vollmer, Musical Forest, 1961, 9½ inches diameter. Courtesy Jack Tilton Gallery, New York.
Because writing is also being with you
and the country,
near its monuments
and the urgencies of bread and love,
writing is not walking away,
it is rescuing oneself and rescuing you,
carrying you with me to the country to which you close your eyes
and because writing is that,
it’s hard and everything else:
that doors close
and hands to be shaken are denied
forging iron in another way.
Because the country is not our home alone
because you look where you know
you won’t see its bloodied corpse.
Because writing is not taking a flight
nor putting out the lights,
it is loving and forgiving, making good promises and condemning,
looking everywhere for ways
to smash my heart against yours
and broken-hearted not waiting tranquilly for the future
but going on to set new fires
because writing is loving you and carrying forward with everyone the, war.
Translated from the Spanish by Zoë Anglesey and Daniel Flores Ascencio.
Staging historical justice in Hernán Ronsino’s Glaxo
“A writer worried about reception is cooking a dead book. A writer’s job is to produce the best possible book in absolute freedom, so the category ‘acceptable’ does not play in the process at all.”
From the train I could look out onto the infinite blue of the sea. I was still exhausted, wakeful from the overnight transatlantic flight to Rome, but looking out at the sea, that Mediterranean sea that was so infinite and so blue, made me forget it all, even myself. I don’t know why.
Originally published in
Nicolas Echevarria, Pam Yates, art by James Nares and Tom Otterness, writing by Daisy Zamora, Kathy Acker, Glenn O’Brien, and more.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
