Date: 2014

"The days of our childhood together were steep steps into a collapsing mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours, inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope i...

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"That's the bruise the ice in the heart was meant to ice."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: December 12, 2016

"The mind too, whirling, vectoring, reaching short but at least / reaching, rising, consigning--towards and towards."

— Graham, Jorie (b. 1950)

Date: December 12, 2016

" And perhaps he speaks / of the nature of light, or the coils in my mind"

— De la O, Marsha

Date: December 12, 2016

"tell me, Bird, how soul inhabits the place of fire, / how soul dwells there in its trembling?"

— De la O, Marsha

Date: February 27, 2017

"And I don't want to pray, but I can picture / the plants deepening right now into the soil, / wanting to live, so I lie down among them, / in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered / in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt / that's been turned and turned like a problem / in the mind."

— Limón, Ada (b. March 28, 1976)

Date: 2017

"There was a snowstorm that lasted three days / and a cavern of monochrome memory"

— Burt, Stephanie