Let The Water Rise

[antigonick]

“Our flowers keep perpetual watch on the dead because we all incomprehensibly know that their sleepy and delicate presence is all we can offer the dead to take with them in their dying, without giving offense through the pride of our living or seeming more alive than the dead.”

—

Jorge Luis Borges, excerpt of “Deaths of Buenos Aires” [Muertes de Buenos Aires], trans. by Ben Belitt in San Martín Copybook

Source — Siempre las flores vigilaron la muerte, porque siempre los hombres incomprensiblemente supimos que su existir dormido y gracioso es el que mejor puede acompañar a los que murieron  sin ofenderlos con soberbia de vida, sin ser más vida que ellos.

[reading-blog-deactivated2023082]

“Men’s indifference to learning about contraception and to taking any responsibility for it is a theme that emerges from many reports of projects that have attempted, and failed, to reach and educate men. One of the most successful programs of contraception education for men, a Planned Parenthood project in Chicago, abandoned its attempts to reach men over the age of twenty-five when it was found that these men simply would not participate… Instead, the project targeted a younger group, and as part of its research the project conducted a survey of over a thousand men aged fifteen to nineteen:These young men were asked whether they agreed with the statement “It’s okay to tell a girl you love her so that you can have sex with her.” Seven out of ten agreed that it’s okay.They were asked whether they agreed with the statement “A guy should use birth control whenever possible.” Eight out of ten disagreed and said a guy should not.And when asked, “If I got a girl pregnant, I would want her to have an abortion,” nearly nine out of ten said no, they would not want her to have an abortion.These teenage men agreed: Deception to obtain coital access is okay; male irresponsibility in contraception is okay; but abortion is not okay—“because it’s wrong.””

— John Stoltenberg, “The Fetus as Penis: Men’s Self-Interest and Abortion Rights” from Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice

[firstfullmoon]

You can’t remember what they did to you. Your loneliness isn’t welcome here, you know, but still you walk the dream-lit village, looking for someone gentle enough. There must be an animal trapped under your shirt, you think, because little claws scratch against your chest and you throb there, but you’re afraid to look because looking means remembering.

Sara Eliza Johnson, from “Parable of the Unclean Spirit” (via firstfullmoon)

[stlowens]

Louise Glück, from “Averno.”

[weltenwellen]

Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

[weltenwellen]

Jennifer Willough, from “The Sun Is Still A Part Of Me”, Beautiful Zero: Poems

[litaratura]

Sophia Lornie, On Anger in Flatline

[streisands]

Yiyun Li, To Speak is to Blunder

[andante-elegiaco]

“I have dreamed of you so often, you are no longer real.”

— Dean Young, from “Robert Desnos (1900-1945),” in Bender: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)

[quotemadness]

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

— Leonard Cohen

[tendermimi]

— Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

[quotemadness]

“Darling, you deserve it all. You deserve love and peace and magic and joy dancing in your eyes. You deserve hearty, deep belly laughter and the right to let those tears fall and water the soil. You deserve freedom and goodness and company and days of bliss and quiet too. You deserve you happy and healed and content and open. So keep going. Go realize into being the life you deserve.”

— Unknown

[elvendeity]

1 @i-wrotethisforme || 2 John Berger, "Will it be a likeness?" from The Shape of a Pocket || 3 @softkatie || 4 @chennai-expression || 5 peanuts || 6 it, Stephen King || 7 @lizclimo || 8 @petrichara || 9 The Essays of Montaigne, “On friendship" || 10 @honeytuesday

part ii here

[gaycommunist]

neta l. august 1st

[larmoyante]

“I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.”

— Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait In Letters

[luthienne]

Frank O'Hara, from Selected Poems; "Poem V (F) W"

[Text ID: you were walking down a street softened by rain / and your footsteps were quiet / and I came around the corner / inside the room / to close the window / and thought what a beautiful person / and it was you]

[metamorphesque]

― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven