Quotes from Kazim Ali

To me, "queerness" is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.

God's true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit. As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth. I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars. [...] I learned God's true language is only silence and breath.

Poetry is the smallest way – it is a small, small way, but it is a way indeed – that the individual body can express its own personhood and value in the face of faceless systems.

Where to now? Only the previously unknowable and unspoken will bring us there.

We have a fractured understanding of how the body exists in physical space and also a deeper internal sense of the body and its purposes. We are, in a way, disconnected from equations of reproduction, or our sexuality has evolutionarily been tilted in a different direction. It begs the scientific question: to what purpose? It doesn't feel accidental to me that throughout history queer people have been magical, holy, and artistic.

The whole world, as we're coming to understand, is quivering in its place.

Whatever,' Jack says, waving his hand, 'I'm sorry you hurt yourself, Salman. You control your own life but you don't want to live with it.' Painted that way, rendered in little swipes, Salman doesn't sound attractive to himself.

And so I had only writing to comfort but it never soothed, it only marked the wound — Kazim Ali, from "Mountain Time," The American Poetry Review (vol. 50, no. 1, January/February 2021)

Maybe part of the point is this: To go on when there is no desire to go on. To practice when practice is burdensome.

In the one place everyone looks like me--has my name--i am the most foreign.

I was already too afraid to say anything. I can't even properly say my own name,

That's what I would say about poetry and prayer. That god or audience--the intended direction of both of those--we wish and wish are real.