MAY OUR LOVE BE TENDER BUT WITH TEETH 🌳 thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you @marina.peng + @great_sneeze for inviting me to come up with text for this project. PSA: (@psa_stl ) is on view at 2222 Chippewa until December 20.
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• • The project of empire is one of theft. Its allegiances are to dominance, deliberately constructed war, and deliberately constructed inequity. American empire—though it sometimes parades in benevolence and peace-keeping—is participant and leader of that effort both domestic and abroad. ~ To resist and dismantle a project that massive calls for us to be equally deliberate with our care and with our relationships; with our language, our art, and our work; with our resistance and with our love. So, I invite us to be brave—to cultivate a love that fiercely protects the most vulnerable of us, a love that does not shy away from anger or principled conflict. May our love be tender but with teeth. May our love be brave enough to demand more of ourselves. We cannot build a better world without becoming better people •
DOES IF MATTER WHAT YOU BELIEVE IF YOU WON'T FIGHT TO MAKE IT TRUE? // @psa_stl feeling incredibly lucky for the generosity & patience & creativity & skill of these two @marina.peng@great_sneeze
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Do you know what you believe in, what kind of world we all deserve? Have you told anyone? Well-meaning as we are, I wonder often about the way language can so easily become a substitute for an embodied commitment. We update our vocabulary, reach for more politicized words, adopt new terms, and self-righteously signal the urgency and rigor we have yet to cultivate in our own actions. And of course, the language is accurate. The stakes are, in fact, as high as terms like “settler colonialism” and “fascism” and “ecological collapse” would suggest. But then what kind of responsibility do we have to the language we use, if we dare to wield it honestly, with full conviction?
The distance between what we believe and how we fight for it isn’t entirely our fault. We’ve been stripped of the resources and agency to build, shape, and live fully dignified lives ourselves, much less build and sustain that degree of collective self-determination across borders, for all of us, together. Such is the nature of late-stage capitalism and imperialism and all of their brazen barbarisms. But how disempowered are we that our political vision for ourselves and for each other seems relegated to a landscape of belief and faith so far removed from our material reality? How often are our words braver than we are?
We can believe all sorts of big, life-affirming things. We shout our commitments to the sky when we’re in a big enough crowd and whisper our riskiest faiths to each other in small, trusted circles. We can believe and believe and believe—and for what? Does it matter what you believe in if you won’t fight for it to be true? Who are you brave enough to become in order to first engage in, and then win, that fight? May our love be brave enough to demand more. We cannot build a better world without becoming braver people. Is it not our responsibility to ourselves and to each other, to become brave enough to win? //
still trying to teach my body it's allowed to hold & celebrate & share good news, that it's worth stretching to make room for goodness (even & especially) in a current period where these kinds of joys feel like a small theft. had a lot of big—& i cannot express this enough—entirely unexpected goodness & good news in april. found out my book, bittering the wound, won the 2024 kate tufts discovery award. traveled to LA for the award ceremony & had my work loved on so openly. the great divya victor introduced my reading with remarks that made me weep for how precisely she located my poems. i tried very hard to let all of the kindness settle into my body. wore my keffiyeh & was both lovingly thanked & lovingly warned to be careful. read poems that made me feel strong & brave in a way that i had forgotten they could. had a dessert that i honestly dreamt about for days. was invited to the la times book festival & talked about st. louis & linked struggles & refusal. sat in the window seat for the flights there & back & got to stare at the topography of our planet in awe because how lucky are we? i haven't felt like a poet in a long while, but i started writing poems again these last few months, which feels strange but in a good way. it feels good to write toward people & publics & beauty & miracles & rage, to write in service of struggle & against the alienation of the market. i forgot how brave poems can make us feel. june said be a menace, remember? find things that make you feel brave. we are living in times that call for the stability of courage & conviction. nurture resiliency, clarity, the freedoms that blossom & spread.
“1948” by @suhad.izm • image of the ongoing n@kba •
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it was announced recently that the death & forced displacement & ethnic cleansing in ga za had officially surpassed numbers reported in the original nakb@. reflecting on suhad’s “1948” again & re-purposing an old post (2021) | when we say pale$tine will be free, we do not mean a ceasefire. we do not mean a gentler occupation. we do not mean quieter violence or more polite ethnic cleansing. we do not mean replacing the leadership of an occupying govt with a more palatable face. what i mean is accurately calling i$rael a settler colonial project rightly indicts the united states as a settler colonial project too. how could you not be moved by the degree of principled political clarity across borders? how could you not be emboldened by such dignified multi-generational mass defiance? when we say p@lestine will be free, we do mean free & i’m deeply humbled by that clarity—within our lifetime. •••
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“But the N@kba has never ceased; it is a structure not an event. Put shortly, the Nakb@ is ongoing. In its most abstract form, the Nak ba is a structure that serves to erase the group dynamic: the attempt to incapacitate the Palest!nians from exercising their political will as a group. It is the continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestin!ans from materializing their right to self-determination.” — from Rabea Eghbariah’s essay, “The Ongoing Nak ba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palesti!ne”
thinking very seriously about the political commitments we make each other, thinking about a free & liberated pal est ine in my lifetime, & the millions of people the world over making the same unyielding, life-affirming demand, themselves subjugated, exploited & conditioned, brutally colonized, deliberately destabilized & forcibly displaced, themselves eye to eye with their own leaders in full-throated dissent. thinking very seriously about the political commitments we make each other, what it requires of each of us, how we practice together in the course of becoming & what kind of people it requires us to then become. what political commitments can we make each other? across foolish, fickle, violent borders? what can we win if we commit? what can we win? ••• “The people who are responsible for this eliminatory violence have names, they are in positions of government, they are funded by other governments who are in settler colonial apartheid solidarity with each other. They have been very clear about their commitments to each other and organizing, and I hope that we will be clear in our commitments to each other across geographies and movements in opposing it.” — Rasha Abdulhadi // st. louis for palestine, out of order, from 10/15 • 10/20 • 10/22 • video by @idrisseffendi • final graphic by Victoria García via @againstapartheid.art
FRIDAY @ 6:30pm — have spend the last 2 weeks putting together this teach-in & panel on black and p@lestin !an solidarity, which is a sustained political choice to clearly recognize and collectively fight against our related subjugation and exploitation; against the related logics of state violence, suppression, unjust criminalization and imprisonment; and against the overlapping ways we are made vulnerable and kept in precarious conditions by exceptionally militarized, murderous capitalist states that occupy and ruin the land. our struggles are linked • thank you to the panelists for agreeing, to @psl_st.louis for being down when i came to them with the idea, and to Caitie Greene for capturing my speech at sunday’s rally • see y’all on friday.
delighted to have a 3-poem excerpt from ‘Bittering’ featured in @thestlouisanco . 🌷🌷🌷 the last poem included is one of my personal favorites. as i was writing it, i remember feeling really daunted by the idea of trying to perform it one day. but i also remember thinking, huh, sounds like a problem for future jacqui. so idk man here we are lol.
still learning how to measure my wins in ways that don’t reproduce institutional power, but pretty proud of myself for this one: a year and a half of reporting on student debt for teen vogue turned into front page of the business (🙄) section in the new york times. not too shabby for a kid who dropped out of college, much less went to journalism school.
a very belated AWP post • finally met douglas kearney & got to thank him for selecting my manuscript (🥲, ty franny choi!), laughed with old friends & new friends, got slightly lost walking around seattle, sold out of books at the CAAPP table, wore overalls 2 days in a row, did poems & went to panels & hugged more people in one weekend than i’ve hugged in a while. (also took a red eye back to stl & confirmed humans were not at all designed for *that* experience & promptly slept for like 16 hours when i got home.)
a blurry & busy last few weeks & months of book-related & other things. thinking on beauty & transitions & seasons & balance. thinking on home & discipline & tenderness & balance. thinking of pacing & pacing & also balance. i started reading for fun again after my fellowship ended & read 4 books in december. genuinely delighted to be meeting this version of myself again. swipe for a century-old postcard (1917), which reads: “am in the big city, am having a good time.” (truly what a gem, tysm @colocha_rachel .) glad for the sun. hope you’re all being loved & loved well.
teen vogue editorial has this cute tradition where they make fake magazine covers as a send-off when folks leave. when i wrapped up my fellowship in november, they gifted me mine. proud of the stories i covered and proud of how much i’ve grown as a journalist. (tysm, allegra 💗🌸) grateful to all the sources, experts, and colleagues i got to learn from. and very much beyond grateful to have been part of teen vogue’s tiny, delightfully spicy, woefully underestimated team for the last 2 years. will miss those folks (and our slack channel) 💛🌼
cover image originally shot by @_sulsuljess
paramore concert on tuesday • danced all night, sweated through my shirt & woke up without a voice the next morning. swipe for a slightly unhinged photo of me (& @i.zaiahj ) post-show, still delirious & melting into a puddle of serotonin.
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#paramore #paramoreconcert #hayleywilliams #thefactorystl
