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: March, 2014

"my good mother, // her mind     a trail of crumbs / in a woods flocked with birds."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)

Date: March, 2014

"Culture: a kind of knife: / cuts one way     opens / your brain to a certain / breed of light     shaves / consciousness to its // purpose, its cross."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)

Date: March, 2014

"Memory, / a jar of flies. Spin off the lid."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)

Date: March, 2014

"O, bold, / bare legs of women / upon which my soul beads / like sweat."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)

Date: 2015

"It's never really dark
anyway, not even inside the skull"

— Young, Dean (b. 1955)

Date: 2015

"And yes, mortal knells / in sleepless hours, hollow knocks of empty / boats against a dock but still the mind / is a meadow, the heart an ocean even though / it burns."

— Young, Dean (b. 1955)

Date: 2016

"You were one of them, / weren't you, with death / itching in the brain like a cloud of midges?"

— Guest, Paul