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2025

BE A STUDENT OF WHAT YOU ADMIRE

DO IT BADLY RATHER THAN NOT AT ALL

TO DESPAIR IS TO CEDE VICTORY TO THOSE WHO DO NOT DESERVE IT

BROADEN YOUR CULTURAL HORIZONS

REVEL IN THE ANALOGUE

ACTION ABSORBS ANXIETY

GRIEF IS PRODUCTIVE; GUILT IS NOT

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“To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.”

— Simone Weil, “The Iliad or The Poem of Force.”

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Phoenix (1947), dir. Keisuke Kinoshita

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To Whom It May Concern, by Koi Miyoshi, published in New Words Press.

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Warsan Shire, from “Hooyo Isn't Home”, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

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i dream of tearing myself open, ribcage first, something grotesque and ugly and keening — crying at the very sight of light. swimming in my own red. my hands are misshapen, rummaging through my own stomach and sickening my own tongue. barbed wire and jagged glass. tasting like bile.

i guess, in my own ways, i’ve never known other ways of existing. haven’t learned to live the way other people do. i’m self puppeteering, clawing at the inside of my torso, reaching up and up and through until my palm expels out my mouth and my mouth bites my hand and my hand is both the fed and the feeder; the damned and the damning. i know this like the back of my hand. get the joke? it’s all humor. a joke or a comedy line or a routine i only know how to smile at. laugh so i don’t cry. the metaphors write themselves.

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Skin 4 

Pastel on paper

2018

lizzhamilton.com

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love comes quietly by Robert Creeley

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desperately need both of these snoopy mugs

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Lev St. Valentine

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But I know that's not true. That's just fantasy. Kid's stuff.

I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun

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queer people of all kinds. i am looking you in the eyes. do not fucking kill yourself. are you listening to me it will be okay. it will get better. i am shaking you by the shoulders do. not. fucking. do. it. you have so much to keep going for and so many people who love you. the cost of the present will not outweigh the life ahead of you. i love you. chin up or down keep walking you'll get there. we will pull you back up onto your feet should you fall. i love you

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"It doesn't have to be like this. We could have it so much better"

Calligraffiti in Chicago, Illinois

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no matter how the election turns out, our path forward is the same. engage in your local community, not just through voting but through all kinds of grass-roots activism. learn about indigenous groups near you, their needs, how you can help them. support local black activist groups. form an affinity group. start a community fridge. get to know your neighbors, the ones who are sketchy and dirty and speak weird and are hard to get along with. the way out will always be through community. no supreme victory or crushing defeat; we must choose over and over again, forever, to live through the good and the bad together, as one.

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WHATEVER WE NAME, WE EXCEED

Or in the naming, lose our power. I called you house and light and pushed you forth—

with each new month you show me I was wrong: here, you’ve made a house with bones of cloud. Look now, your darkness is so bright. Of course,

you’re right— I call this love. It burns to ash, and—never bird—returns to flame.

When the border fell and armies came, they cut not only arms but tongues. They opened every house and muted ears, and when the family

landed on these once again rebranded shores they found the rocks weren’t rocks, the bread not bread, the letters broken, hammer-scattered, the sky a thing that hung too low upon their heads.

Perhaps that’s how I know it, in this language their own children would refuse— dziecko, kochanek, matka, dzień—

these things I try to name each day were never mine to lose. MARY KOVALESKI BYRNES