bromeliaceae :: bromelioideae

[bromelioideae]

I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn't possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

Zoe Leonard, 1992.

Queer and Then? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

[bromelioideae]

“I came to see through my writing that no matter how hard we in the movement worked, nothing seemed to change.” She added: “We were like an angry dog on a leash that had turned on its master. It could bark and howl and snap, and sometimes even bite, but the master was always in control.”

Anne Moody, Author of ‘Coming of Age in Mississippi,’ Dies at 74 - NYTimes.com

[genderjusticeenvironment]

February 25—Not to be missed! Lisa Paravisini-Gebert at Yale.

[ucsdspecialcollections]

Visit Original Link

New Writing Series readings by Tisa Bryant and Robin Coste Lewis

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of fiction-essays that remix narratives of black presences in film, literature and visual art.  She is co-editor and publisher of the cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival.  A member of the Dark Room Collective, she recently participated in a reunion tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renowned African diasporic reading series and arts exhibition.  Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Animal Shelter, Black Clock, Bombay Gin, Mandorla, Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series, and Viz.  She is at work on a novel, The Curator, and teaches fiction and hybrid forms in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles.

Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC. A Cave Canem fellow, she received her MFA from NYU and an MTS in Sanskrit from Harvard’s Divinity School. A finalist for the International War Poetry Prize, the National Rita Dove Prize, and the Discovery Prize, her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College and the NYU/MFA in Paris. Born in Compton, her family is from New Orleans. Her book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus, is forthcoming from Knopf.

[bromelioideae]

Tis and Robin!

[bromelioideae]

petrichor

petrichor

Syllabification: pet·ri·chor

Pronunciation: /ˈpeˌtrīkôr /

Definition of petrichor in English:

NOUN A pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.

[bromelioideae]

Wozan Monza, Chlordécone (Marie-Galante, 2012)

[bromelioideae]

“You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn’t call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?”

-Claudia Rankine, Citizen Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’ - NYTimes.com

[bromelioideae]

Woman who had been moved out of the Santee-Cooper basin to Orangeburg Farms, a FSA (Farm Security Administration) project in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, 1941. Photographer: Jack Delano

[bromelioideae]

favorite.

[bromelioideae]

Khaliyl Iloyi. (over and over and over again.)

[processedlives]

Yet, one cannot avoid wondering about the limitations of the idea of a black radical tradition. Perhaps there are ways it is insufficient in the face of the wide-ranging demands of black life. Perhaps it is not enough. Perhaps it never will be. Perhaps it was never meant to be enough. Here, the image of a broken bridge comes to mind—something that I was trying to come to terms with during the roundtable when I used the notion of a “queer pier” to suggest that the idea of a black radical tradition might simply serve as an occasion for congregating at the limits of possibility, as if it was a platform for innovation or a workshop that gestures toward an unknown horizon or some destination on the other side; and although the prospects of arrival are slim, the reach provides a kind of refuge and a place to momentarily escape.

Nijah Cunningham, A Queer Pier: Roundtable on the Idea of a Black Radical Tradition (via processedlives)

[studiosouthzero]

From the Door of No Return series @ Franconia Sculpture Park. “Sight On Site” Rough cut red pine, acrylic, sand 12’x8’x12, 2014

Torkwase Dyson.

[bromelioideae]

stunning, 'kwase.

[bromelioideae]

(via Twin Lakes Llama Ranch)

[queerethnographies]

“Like others before - and no doubt after - me, I am concerned that, treated as a philosophical system rather than an intellectual tool, queer theory serves once again to silence what deconstruction calls the other. You know, most of us.”

- Linda Garber, One Step Global, Two Steps Back? Race, Gender and Queer Studies (GLQ, 126-127)

[atdepthindebt-blog]

My first diving school.  PADI certified.

http://uwsafaris.com/

[bromelioideae]

kwase!

[bromelioideae]

There is a thriving Black community on Salt Spring that has been there for more than 150 years. The landscape was very nurturing. I was surrounded by towering trees and glistening water. We had a garden and could also buy or trade fresh produce with our neighbors.

Out of the Shadows: A Conversation with Evelyn C. White | The Feminist Wire

[bromelioideae]

“How does your whiteness inform your motherf—ing stupidity?”

Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz inspires students [at Yale University] | Repeating Islands