Ilya Kaminsky

Friends, I’ll be taking time away from social media for a while. Be well. Vacation Today I cannot receive you desperation, disappointment, tough legions of death. Come by some other time, never, and leave gallantly your business cards Emil Botta, Tr. fr Romanian by L. Georgesc

One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. In revising you teach yourself. You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not. --Fanny Howe, RIP

When politicians cancel Medicaid for millions of people right at the start of Disability Pride Month—it is time to reread classics: "Disability should move out of the realm of the hospital room to the realm of political minority -Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies

I went to college in 1997. My mother was a widow, a refugee, and couldn’t help me pay for it. There is no way I would be able to afford college if it was 2025 & the bill US Congress just passed was the law of the land. There are millions of people like me. What a shame.

Everyone is tired of endless images of violence—but if I don’t post this, who will (since you won’t find it in most Western news): Russia attacked Odesa again, yet another attack this week. “A court martial of a city,” a friend calls it.

“ Write it. Write. In ordinary ink on ordinary paper: they were given no food, they all died of hunger. "All. How many? It's a big meadow….” Szymborska wrote this after WW2. What changed? Starving people is a war crime. Starving people is a war crime. poemhunter.com/poem/hunger-ca…

Killing people in food lines is a war crime.

Whatever is your take on a particular regime, bombing a news station is a war crime.

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Four words, and already we are in Kafka Territory: "Hey You! Papers, please?"

"They don't understand yet ... what those who read lyric poetry know well. By virtue of mere being--a lyric is a moment that somehow manages to spit at the system's feet — right onto the gleaming boots that so many broad-chested strongmen had kissed in tearful devotion."

Overheard: "Soon, bored with their i-phones, i-pods and other forms of "mini me" which they see as mirrors, and not forms of surveillance -- they will udnerstand: t o remember is to betray a regime built on forgetting. Memory itself becomes a form of rebellion."

overheard: "In a life-time of a regime, a moment arrives when vulgarity isn’t a personal failing — it’s a state policy. Kitsch is armor against ethics; it’s collective anesthesia, pumped through every glowing screen and marching chant."

overheard: "In a lifetime of a regime, a period arrives when lies are no longer a flaw in the system — they’re its currency. A time comes when in a regime where truth has no value, fiction becomes the only legal tender."