My Fig Tree

They will rot in my hand before I can taste the fruit

[ritikajyala]

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

[aikaleegrave]

it’s easier to tell a story without my face, just my hands moving the pen. i’m not worth a poem, but here’s someone who could be. offer a memory bandaged with metaphor until it’s unrecognizable

and therefore good enough. everything around me wrapped in the gray haze of winter / spring / summer / any new excuse i can pin my heart to. anything to explain the imagined tenderness i should’ve grown out of by now. the sweet-rot of magnolia petals under my feet saying i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’ll be worth something someday, but in the meantime,

legends make better poems, don’t they? stories about people with the same hurt but better reasons for it. everyone feels this way. yes, but here’s a version of me in a world that justifies it all. that makes heroic the soft-selfish parts of me cast ugly by bathroom light. the tedium of forgiving myself. i’m wrapped in the terror that if you stripped me down far enough, there’d be nothing at all. i tell a story and it matters to someone else. cities of glittering falsehoods. here’s a memory that explains my bruised heart. when i was —

oh, this again?

no. i tell a story. it’s pretty, like hollow things are. lightning lasts less than a heartbeat and thunder is the shallowest cut. if i told the story and it had my face, it wouldn’t mean anything that hasn’t been said already.

a year blinks past. it isn’t that the wound is deep, just that i’m empty underneath. does it matter? look, the ocean is silver and the trees swallow light. the whole sky folds into something you could tuck in your pocket and forget about until you find it shrunk tight by the washing machine. i’ll paint it and put it in a frame. i won’t sign my name. we can pretend this poem is about someone else.

4.10.21

[afigtree]

Concentration abandons me like a father, confident I will be fine without it.

Isn’t that a new low of a look?

Concentration is my own, but dads belong to nobody but the hunger in their own hearts.

In unspoken honor of all the dead and rotting, things said between us, the cemetery is our meeting place. Who needs words when you can exchange smoky sacred breath in the passing of fire between fingers, liquor burning down scorched throats like mouthfuls of the Phlegethon, sorrow, and anger, and hurt.

Everyone is scarred by each other, and the pregnant luminesce of the moon can barely contain each new crater born of longing, self-loathing, and all the depressed hearts of those who cast their gaze up in silent prayer.

How can you lay all that hate on 1 person when you had a hand in pushing them away.

[lissar-deactivated20220127]

this poem plays in my head all! the! time! it’s maddening.

transcript:

[This is the house that built me / and I’m gonna burn it down. / This is the river I crawled from/ and I refuse to drown here. / And bless the strippers / but fuck the men. / And bless the berries / but fuck the farm. / And bless the daughter / but fuck the family. / What is a home / if not the first place you learn to run from? / You’ve got to bite the hand / that starves you, and in doing so / Praise the place that birthed you. / Birthed you fucked up. / Birthed you ugly, and interesting, / and ready to scream.“— Courtney Love Prays To Oregon, Clementine von Radics]

[afigtree]

While Stella had absolute faith in him to take care of her, she worried for his well-being, as she was inept in being able to take care of him should he ever need it. He fidgeted with the ring on his finger, a tell indicating his own apprehension, and Stella wished with all her heart that she was as good with people as he was, knew what words to say to dispel a situation or bring some reassurance. Wish she knew what to say to bring a smile to his face as well. But she was lacking, and he deserved someone with a more open and genuine heart to laugh and joke with him.

Obligations and Affairs - R.E.D.S

[afigtree]

Nova was very much the sun made flesh in Stella's eyes for all the darkness of her hair. Vibrant and warm, something to aspire to reach, glorious sunlight promoting growth, soothing heat to rekindle the fire under your skin when the chill of your thoughts are so bitter you're sure frostbite is just around the corner. But she was also very much scathing, burning if you were unused to her sharp mouth, blisters on the ego from her crafty way of sinking into the gravel of your flesh and filling you with the near searing heat of her clever jabs should you dare walk over them with bare feet. The sun made flesh, and yet Stella still worried about her. (How much of Nova was the sun, and how much of her was Icarus? Not that Stella knew to be concerned with that question just yet.)

Obligations and Affairs - R.E.D.S

[ckmercedes]

You’ve fallen into a spell,

in which your reflection

has imprisoned you.

My Dearest Narcissus, | c.k.m

Snippet taken from MY DEAREST NARCISSUS poem that was submitted to a literary magazine as a contest submission.

[thompsborn]

my goal when i write is to have something that resonates with at least one person. it can be a scene, a quote, a character, a thought, a throw-away line—whatever it may be, i just want something to stick with someone.

maybe it’s a line that just hits. maybe it’s a feeling that comes with the story. maybe it’s just a single word that stood out.

maybe that someone is me. maybe it’s a friend, a stranger, a random person i’ve never met.

the specifics aren’t what matter to me.

i just want my writing, even when what i’ve written is meaningless and fun and short, to have some kind of lasting effect. i want my words to matter!!! even if it’s only to me

[weltenwellen]

Tony Hoagland, from “Better Than Expected”, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God

[prizecards]

[afigtree]

People sometimes get so wrapped up in themselves they forgot about the others. That was something Stella had easily noticed in her quiet observations of the vast and yet so terribly small world around her. Most people narrowed things down onto themselves, either making themselves bigger or shrinking down to best prop the world upon their shoulders. Stella and she sometimes thought Eric as well, were a part of the latter group, while Nova and maybe the eldest vampire brother were of the former. Though most others forget that they will crush under the weight of their own, Stella always found herself hoping that those around her would find the strength to rise up, Stella herself excluded from those hopes.

Obligations and Affairs - R.E.D.S

[afigtree]

He let his hand slid down her neck, over her sternum, before letting it rest on her stomach. “Life never stops giving little miracles.” He pushed himself down to bring his face even with her stomach. “My love, you are a god!” he cheered, his mind finding the soft words of his aunt as she cooed over the protruding belly of her neighbor, “Let there be light, and intelligence blossomed in the womb.”

Obligations and Affairs - R.E.D.S

[afigtree]

That was one of the things about being with Rosario that he could say had changed him for the better. Emotions were rarely talked about in his home. There were facts and few opinions shared between him and his aunt. Emotions were fickle, being too fluid and full of unease to ever properly address. All of them had been clumsy in the face of tears and raw emotion. Phillips, while something of a father figure became increasingly stoic in the face of intense emotion, he would sit there with you, but offer little in the way of comfort. Grace had friends, but it was easy to show exuberance and fill the silence by talking, and it was so easy to talk about nothing. Rosa had been one of the first people who had been able to coax Grace into talking about some of the things that truly went on in his head. It had been the first time he understood and realized the gift it was that to open himself up to her, and the more willing she was to open up to him, offering up a balance of communication he had rarely experienced.

Obligations and Affairs - R.E.D.S

[afigtree]

Vane could easily count on one hand the number of people who ever declared their love for him and meant it as more than a passing joke or temporary praise. His aunt, Asena, was one. Quiet affirmations as darkness fell, so rare in moments of passing that Vane always latched on to the words with wide eyes and a rushed agreement that he felt the same as she flitted from the room as if terrified that by voicing her love for her son of sorts, he'd be stolen from her. There had been a boy sly and mischievous, more terrified of the world than he let on, breathing love into Vane's mouth, hissed out as if in anger of what had been placed upon him. A young girl, open and naïve, longing for a love to fill her up, falling too hard and fast, constantly murmuring the words onto his skin in a plea that he had run from, seeking something more than the cage he felt she'd place him in. And then there was Rosaria, the words spoken assuredly in the precious moments they had together, through tears, through laughter, breathless, skin to skin. Spoken into her hair, in her droll yet fond looks during the moments common sense vacated him. Murmured to him sleepily as she studied his face as they relaxed together on his couch, whispered to her as sleep overcame him, within playful banter as they came down from the high of a food fight in the kitchen, kissed onto the skin of thighs. A steady stream passed between the two of them presented as comfort, solace, gentle reprimanding, reminders, and assurance.

Obligations and Affairs - R.E.D.S

[afigtree]

She had been looking longingly at college brochures all of summer and had felt the simmering regret as classes in most colleges had already started, leaving her sitting on a crate box watching everyone drive off without her, stinging from the kicked up gravel of her unspoken jealousies.

Stars Aligned - R.E.D.S

[afigtree]

She hated confrontation and conflict, but she was also unwilling for someone to strike at her mom, when they didn’t know… didn’t know the depth of the older woman’s sorrow, something she kept wound so tightly within her even her own daughters failed to take even the smallest of her grief into their hands to soothe.

Stars Aligned - R.E.D.S

[afigtree]

...she stopped her music, the sounds of her mother screaming called for her attention. Celeste sighed, assuming that it was one of those days where her mom was more erratic than normal. She could spend hours looking into random containers of water and yelling or sobbing about her poor poor daughters; medical pine, tucked between her fingers, slippery with tears, snot and saliva as she rubbed at her face and sniffled. She went to head outside and coax her mother into bed with the promise of brownies soon to pop into the oven. The chocolate was a sweet treat to coax her mother out of the labyrinth of her mind, a darkness triggered by fights and stress.

Stars Aligned - R.E.D.S