So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

-Li-Young Lee

miseengarde:

white girls who want my culture’s bindis and saris and henna 

take my skin colour too

and my dark brown lips

take my self-hatred because i don’t fit into the euro-centric ideals of beauty

take the oppression too

take the history of colonization that has devastated my country

and the drones that currently devastate my country

take all the bad stuff too

not just the pretty, shiny, sparky bits

take the ugly, dehumanizing and shitty parts too