An open letter, Black cartoon characters, permission, mothers before motherhood, the neighbor you don’t know yet, Pride as memory, and a sid
Show & Tell
i don't do bad sauce passes
d e v o n

izzy's playlists!
Cosimo Galluzzi

Love Begins

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Three Goblin Art
DEAR READER
Today's Document
taylor price
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Peter Solarz

Kaledo Art
Sweet Seals For You, Always
sheepfilms
RMH
dirt enthusiast
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@ashandamen
An open letter, Black cartoon characters, permission, mothers before motherhood, the neighbor you don’t know yet, Pride as memory, and a sid
Most 80s cereal mascots were manic, animated creatures… rabbits stealing Trix, tigers screaming about Frosted Flakes, and cartoon Smurfs pushing bright red Smurfberry Crunch.
King Vitaman was just a guy.
Shaped like little crowns and fortified with iron and low enough in sugar to pass federal assistance standards, it tasted faintly of molasses and heavily of toasted grain. To this day, the roof of my mouth remembers the exact texture of a King Vitaman crown.
For decades, it survived almost entirely as the default childhood cereal for low-income households. We talk endlessly about pop-culture nostalgia, but we rarely talk about class-specific nostalgia. Who else remembers the King?
note: I didn’t realize until this note it was Vita”man” and not Vita”min”. Clever.
Bird on Money
A personal essay about Basquiat, Second Life, and the strange places art can still reach us.
The first time I saw Basquiat's "Bird on Money," I was in Second Life.
I Am Not Here To Be Reduced To Warmth
You brought your ruin like scent, something already burning before you walked through my door.
The fire began elsewhere, but you carried it like perfume.
I swept a place for you inside my ribcage, where breath used to live.
You came in heavy, I tried to hold it. You came in loud, I tried to listen.
You came in bitter, I tried to taste it sweet.
Lord knows,
I bent like Sunday knees. Broke like bread, just to keep peace on your table.
You brought your men, your son. Three mothers’ worth of ghosts.
A Sunday of noise. Gospel choir of opinions. A voice full of war stories disguised as scripture.
I held your history until it started speaking in my sleep.
Until your ghosts became my congregation.
I was a window once. Open. In a room that faced east.
There were flowers. Marigolds that bloomed without breaking, roots that knew their ground.
Now I am noise. I am the stretch marks on my own sanity.
I am smoke.
The air won’t settle. The walls hum without wind.
The quiet I once wore like a crucifix, does not come home to me anymore.
I am not your kindling. Not your altar, nor your ashtray.
I am not here to be reduced to warmth.
The Long Memory of Water
They always come back to me. Even when they pretend to forget, they come back.
Sometimes they sing. Sometimes they scream. Sometimes they don’t make a sound at all.
But I hear them.
I have no mouth, no tongue, no hands to pray with.
Only current. Only flow. Only the long memory of water.
I remember the first boy who bled into me. His blood was thin and sweet. It didn’t stay red for long, the river never lets a color stay what it started as.
I remember the girl who dropped her shoes, walked barefoot into me, said she needed to feel something clean after what happened behind the laundromat.
I remember the songs they used to sing from the banks when the air was thick with cotton and grief, and the trees knew better than to ask questions.
The body of a Black man, tied to a cotton sack filled with stones. They said it was suicide. The sack said otherwise. He drifted in my arms for three days before a child found him snagged beneath the cypress roots.
His mother came to my bank, wearing her church dress and a fury she refused to speak aloud. She knelt in the mud. She did not cry. Just whispered, “I know you saw.” And I had.
I remember the children that summer, splashing through me just one week before they were found in a ditch. I remember laugher, and their voices.
One liked jazz. One liked baseball. The other wrote poems in the margins of his Bible.
They laughed in the shallows, like the world would always let them.
Someone threw a bloodied shoe into me. Not because it belonged to them, but because guilt is heavier than leather.
I carried it anyway.
I remember the older gentleman, tied to a fence and beaten not far from my bend. The rain came days later, washing his blood washed into as if the sky itself refused to let it dry.
A girl from town dropped in a rosary. Didn’t say a word. Just stood there in the storm, fists clenched so tightly, I thought she’d split her palms open.
I took the rosary. Let it float. It still glints under moonlight, if you know where to look.
And I remember the bridge.
How it groaned under the weight of hope and bodies. How feet thudded like heartbeats. How the tear gas floated down softly, like clouds that had forgotten how to be gentle.
They came rushing into me that day, some crawling, some stumbling, some carrying others who could no longer carry themselves.
They didn’t ask me to save them.
They asked me to hold what they no longer could.
And so I did.
I held shoes. Bibles. Gloves. Teeth.
A paper flag that refused to sink, no matter how deeply I pulled.
A yellow scarf snagged on a limb, just below the surface, fluttering gently, like something remembering who it belonged to.
But I remember clearly.
I remember them all. The singers and the silent, the drowned and the delivered, the ones who jumped and the ones who were thrown.
______________________________________
This story is a part of The Bridge Stayed Still, a lyrical series exploring Black memory, trauma, protest and resilience. Each piece stands alone, yet together they form an interconnected mosaic… fractured glimpses that reveal both the innocence of childhood as it’s confronted by history and the quiet testimonies of overlooked witnesses.
Black men don't get anxiety
We just wake up at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling fan, like it might whisper an answer.
We just sit in the car, outside our home, with the engine off, music low, trying to remember if this is a place we are allowed to rest.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just hear our father’s silence like a hymn, and carry weight in our chests like a birthright. A weight no one sees, a weight we’ll never put down.
We just feel like our mouths are loaded guns. Every syllable a misfire. Our tongues, tripwires.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
That’s what they slip into our pockets when we’re boys. Fold into our hands like a blueprint, tell us to build something strong out of it.
Black boys don’t get anxiety.
We just have to stop all that crying. Grow up. Fast, like the world’s already tired of our childhood. Trade toy soldiers for real battles, quiet ones, inside.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just grind our teeth down to dust, we just have pressure in our heads, we just get tension in our jaws, so tight, we forget we ever had mouths that could pray.
We don’t pray enough.
Black men don’t get anxiety,
but our bodies keep shaking like they’re screaming. And our mothers keep calling, like they can hear it.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just need to calm down, need to relax, need to stop making everything so complicated.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just smoke a little bit, drink a little bit. Fuck to forget our name for a while. Drink a little more to forget hers too.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just have a fear of commitment. Hearts that learned to love with one foot already out the door. We just need to open up more, but not too much. We just need to be more vulnerable, but not too vulnerable.
We just need to be men.
(but not those kinds of men)
Strong Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just laugh at the wrong times, jokes sharp enough to slice open the parts of ourselves that ache too much to even touch any other way.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We don’t have a reason to be nervous... what, are we guilty or something? Are we scared?
Real Black men don’t get anxiety.
We get attitude problems. We get trust issues. We get emotionally unavailable. We get hard to talk to.
We just need to stop being so negative all the time.
Positive Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just check the exits when we walk in a room. Sit with our backs to the wall. Memorize every face in the room that stares too long, and stands too close.
Call it how we were raised, call it survival dressed up as instinct.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just don’t say what we need, we don’t ask to be held. We don’t admit her warmth frightens us more than any empty street at midnight, than any red and blue siren, than any white judge’s gavel falling.
Black men don’t get anxiety.
We just wake up mad. We just wake up tired. We just wake up anyway. At 3 a.m. Staring at the ceiling fan, like it might whisper an answer.
Poems and Short Writings
The Art of Not Trying
(after exhaustion & other false gods)
I used to pray
like a man filing reports.
Thought if I got the details right,
folded my hands just so,
spoke like I meant it,
memorized the right verses,
I could win God’s approval
like a performance review.
I worked hard at faith.
Clocked in.
Cleaned up.
Didn’t ask too many questions.
Even my doubt
was dressed for Sunday.
Stillness was a task
I added to the list.
Drink the tea.
Lower the voice.
Call it peace.
Fake it if it doesn’t show up.
I brewed chamomile
and tried not to shake.
Sat on the edge of the bed
with my jaw locked and my spine straight,
as if posture could summon
the Holy Ghost.
But the ghost didn’t come.
Not the way I wanted.
No glow. No wind. No comfort.
Peace came
like a man late to his own funeral
mud on his boots,
grief in his eyes,
and a face that looked
a little too much like mine.
He didn’t say a word.
Just sat down
and let the silence
fill the room like smoke.
No music.
No breakthrough.
Just breath.
Just weight.
And something in me cracked
like an old door
that finally gave in.
I let the prayer fall
without grammar.
No shape.
No beauty.
No performance.
Only the sound
of a man too tired to pretend
he’s not tired.
And that
was the holiest thing
I had ever done.
Now, I know
rest doesn’t reward effort.
It doesn’t come
because you earned it.
It waits,
quiet and steady,
for the moment
you stop trying
to deserve it.
It doesn’t applaud discipline
or show up for good behavior.
It slips in
when you’ve got nothing left to prove,
nothing polished to offer,
nothing left but breath
and bare hands.
Rest is not the prize.
It’s the floor you fall to
when the ladders break.
And peace..
peace isn’t soft.
It’s not polite.
It doesn’t care if you’re ready.
Peace is what stays
when everything you built
to impress God
finally burns down
and you don’t rush
to rebuild it.
Poems and Short Writings
🕊️
Forgetting is a ghost
I tell myself I have let it go..
opened my fists,
let the weight slip through my fingers
like breath on glass..
there, then gone.
But forgiveness does not stitch the wound,
does not erase the past,
only teaches you how to carry it.
The scar stays..
tight in the cold,
raw in the rain.
I said I forgave the silence
for making me small,
for making me afraid,
for teaching me
that being unseen
was the safest way to survive.
I said I forgave the world
for pressing me into a shape
I never chose,
for asking me to shrink
when all I wanted was to expand.
I said I forgave myself
for mistaking endurance for strength,
for burying my voice
before it could rise,
for believing silence
and suffering
was the price of manhood.
But still, it burns..
not like fire,
but embers under ash,
a heat waiting.
If forgiveness is freedom,
why does it still press against my ribs?
Why does it settle in my chest..
tight, coiled..
waiting to be named?
I have forgiven.
But forgetting?
Forgetting is a ghost..
a shadow of remembering,
with nowhere to go,
asking to be let back in.
Poems and Short Writings
i think it’s crazy when you take someone that pushes you to be better and gives you free game on spirituality and wealth for granted.
like what about starting to love yourself ? let people help you achieve your goals. there’s no secret to life, we are social beings and the only reason why human beings are still alive is through transmission.
only broke, unhealthy and unsuccessful people are stuck in their ways bcs they’re close minded and have too big of an ego to admit to themselves that they need people and need to learn new things.
stop overcomplicating things and thinking your way through life instead of living and feeling it.
I was a kingdom before you
The moon is a lazy voyeur..
peeking through blinds,
draped in the sweat of our second chances.
You smell like the end
of something I never wanted
to survive.
I was stitched together by
quiet women,
ghosts who pressed sugar
into the mouths of screaming boys.
They told me:
Love slow.
Love foolish.
Love like you’ve got time..
but lose it anyway.
You enter like a hum,
your voice the color of dusk
if dusk could ache.
Your hands..
cartographers mapping
what even I forgot I buried.
I was a kingdom before you.
Now I’m just a hallway
that leads to your name.
I let you in,
not like a guest
but like a storm
I prayed for in secret.
You keep tenderness
in your back pocket,
pulling it out
when the world gets too cruel
for my soft armor.
And I..
I learn how to unbuckle myself,
shed the versions of me
that flinch when kissed.
We don’t speak in futures.
We whisper in nows.
We dance in the dark
watched by our regrets.
You pour more of you into me
like fire,
like you were made to undo
the silence in my bones.
And baby,
I roll into you
like the night does the sea..
slow,
certain,
drenched in God.
And wanting
nothing
but more.
Poems and Short Writings
Your hoodie on my chair
It’s not need.
I’ve weathered empty skies,
silences that stayed unanswered.
But you..
you move through a room
like wind unlatching a window.
Your voice settles things
without naming the storm.
Most arrive loud,
wearing attention
like perfume.
You come in
like permission to exhale.
i’m not asking your future.
Just your laugh in my kitchen,
your hoodie on my chair,
your glance down the hallway,
the crease of you in my bed.
You don’t have to stay..
just don’t vanish.
Let the door close soft,
like you mean to return.
She had a bag of clementines 🍊
She was peeling one-
slow, methodic, like it hurt her.
Like the skin was was someone
she'd loved once.
Her fingers trembled
in that way sorrow makes holy-
the devotion of keeping it together.
How women are taught
to cry like saints:
quiet, citrus-sweet,
and alone.
The bench was wide enough
for two.
The sun was kind.
The world, indifferent.
In another world,
I might've sat beside her,
offered a tissue
or a scripture.
But in this on,
we make churches of avoidance.
We pray by not interfering.
Her eyes-
black galaxies
rimmed in salt-
met mine
for a moment too long.
And I swear
the universe
cleared its throat.
“Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”
— Franz Kafka, Diaries 1914-1923
pray even when the waters are calm
#amen