The idea that Dolly is Dolly because of the strength of American diversity is one that pretends to be about how good Dolly is when it is really a story about how good we believe we are. In this story, the soul of America is a progressive teleology that will always, inevitably bend toward justice. America’s soul is immune to everyday evidence of its fallibility, and outright antagonistic to any suggestion that it is more myth than manifest destiny. Belief in the soul of America is as strong as another belief, with similar embodied metaphors. The soul is always at war with the nation’s racist bones. You know the racist bones.

from The Dolly Moment by Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom (2021)

Attribution

In the great room of many volatile gods
where I keep burning. Hot grass.
Absence of trees. In which a world keeps noxiously turning
for the survival of what?     Gives loss its feral name.

Define  allegiance. Against the frame.
Who will love me when I am at last
ungovernable?     Answers the underground.

— from At the end of the world, you tell me about the bees by Muriel Leung