Saeed Jones Quotes

We dialed the newly dead
but they wouldn't answer. We texted,
begging us to call them back, but
the newly dead don't know how to
read. In America, a gathering of people
is called target practice or a funeral,
depending on who lives long enough
to define the terms.

I was proud of my exhaustion, as if the darkness circling my eyes was proof of my adulthood.

to escape the wreck of someone else’s memory.

The older I got, the more frequently my mother and I would push each other to the precipice of what we actually needed to say, only to back off just before either of us was forced to get more specific than vague allusions to 'feelings' and 'questions.' But this only meant that the unanswered questions became ever more loaded

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live. — MAMIE ELIZABETH TILL-MOBLEY

windows open to waterfalls

In that way we were both just like each other. We both allowed too deep of a contrast between our interiors and our exteriors. We both clung to self-assured masks that actually allowed us to cause ourselves more unseen harm.

The spectacle of ordinary gay men baffled me.

You were never going to be one of them, said the lightning in my shoulder. Stupid, stupid, stupid, answered the thunder in my fists. I felt like I’d been split open.

I was proud of my exhaustion, as if the darkness circling my eyes was proof of my adulthood. Proof that I could hold my own, no longer just a son or grandson but an I.

"A few months and many deaths ago, I asked someone "how are you doing" and felt, in the way her eye fell, how I had failed her before I had even reached the end of my question. I've hurt many people but it's the unintended wounds I claim now as children."

AC had been broken all summer. A breeze drifted into the car, then slipped away as if it knew to leave us alone.

winter stars stitched into puddles

If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.

He turned it facedown on the nightstand then set upon me like the sunlight itself.