#hanif abdurraqib

[postmodernau]

happy 9th anniversary of tell a friend you’re in love with them tonight to all who celebrate

[wehavewords]

"No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole."

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

[danielriddlerodriguez]

VARIATIONS ON A THEME: DIDN’T MY LORD DELIVER DANIEL

--Hanif Abdurraqib

I asked to be swallowed & never asked to be saved. in any direction the wind blows, it drags you closer to the day of judgement. in every vicious note, the wind stalks the soul, which is a kiss away from becoming ash. vanity is the ship upon which all other sins set sail. I flex in forgiving light. I know my angles. I age backwards. only child of a wretched season. the sky, weary of the horrible racket made by all our gospels & all our dreaming, rotted with grey, closing in on itself. still, I’ll take it. I have imagined all of the ways there are to die & the mirror says I survive them all. too pretty to get gone. I have a memory of the sun catching a stained glass window & spitting the red of a saint’s robe onto the concrete where someone had sprayed painted I hope all my niggas find heaven. I have a memory of my grandmother smoking a pack a day & flicking cigarette ash onto a small mirror on her nightstand. the soul makes its own reflection. I swear the storm took everyone except me this time. so pretty I am left here to nurse the chaos of my loneliness. I did not summon the den or the lion but I did summon the moan of the vacant heart, which led to my wandering in the dark. no one asks Jonah if there was peace before the panic, for a moment, sharp & thin as the thread between leaving & staying. when, inside of the whale, he called out seeking mercy & what was returned to him was his own voice. the forgiveness he prayed for, stained with red & tucked inside the echo of his prayers.

[crowdthebaseline]

[26.7.29]

[necessarypretext]

[missanniewhimsy]

There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

Hanif Abdurraquib - A Little Devil in America

[odense]

When he convinced NASA to let him go back it was 1998 & he was 77 & he told a committee that what happens to the body in space is the same as what happens to the body as it ages which means that he had already begun to live the familiar undoing & wanted to sit at the edge of the dark & vast cavern of stars again & he hadn’t been back up there in 36 years & the country swore he couldn’t go back because they needed him to be a politician & a war hero & I wonder what his dreams must have been like in the years between ascension & I’m saying that once you’ve seen the impossible how can you ever stay earthbound for 36 years knowing what’s up there & it is true that none of us will live forever & the mere existence of that knowledge suggests we all have to pick a thing we might die for if the opportunity arose & one time before he pushed past the atmosphere in 1998, John Glenn visited my middle school & when I reached my hand out firm & rigid to shake his the way my father taught me John Glenn took my small hand in both of his hands & I asked him if he was ever afraid & he looked somewhere above my head somewhere beyond even the ceiling & he said I’ve never been more afraid than I have been curious

'JOHN GLENN, CAMBRIDGE, OHIO (1921-2016)'

from There’s Always This Year, by Hanif Abdurraqib

[chicamanson]

Brief Notes On Staying // No One Is Making Their Best Work When They Want To Die by Hanif Abdurraqib