After Life

she/they | a drifting writer

[ryebreadgf]

andrea castro / nicola samoti / kai samuels-davis / henrietta harris / andrés cerpa

[godsopenwound]

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. You ask a man passing on the road to lift your shirt and check and he retches at what he sees, says the flesh there overflows, as if grinding its own meat, that strips of skin curl away from the wound like rot mushrooms growing on a tree, and he can't help you, you make him sick, he says, he has to go now, so you wander some more until you reach the gate, which is the end of who you could have been, the end of the dream of your body made full with starmilk, propelled by a heart of sea anemone. You’ll be hungry forever if you stay here, trying to hide your secret mouth from all this light. Before you can cross the gate into that dark valley, you must look at yourself. You can think of other words for red: crimson, cherry, scarlet. But there's no other name for blood, no name for a shame like this, its hiss of pain when you press your finger to it, the sweet stain it leaves on your fingertip. You just have to taste it.

Sara Eliza Johnson, Parable of the Unclean Spirit

[barcarole]

Detail from Melancholy, Edvard Munch, 1892.

[kiisuuumii]

ALT

W. S. Merwin, from “Black Cherries,” featured in Leaning toward Light

[kiisuuumii]

ALT

Ellen Bass, from “Sous-Chef,” featured in Leaning toward Light

[existential-celestial]

“The song within your heart could never rise / Until love bade it spread its wings and soar. / Nor could you look on Beauty’s face before / A poet’s burning mouth had touched your eyes.”

— Joyce Kilmer, from “In Memory,” in Main Street and Other Poems

[flowerytale]

Alex Dimitrov, from “Together and by Ourselves”

[weltenwellen]

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

[edinburgh-by-the-sea]

mingling of colours

[metamorphesque]

― Ovid, Metamorphoses

[intezaarlily]

the ache of nostalgia

[literaryvein-reblogs]

just another list of "beautiful" words

for your next poem/story

Agelast - a person who never laughs

Afroth - in a state of lively or angry excitement

Apatheia - freedom or release from emotion or excitement

Biblioklept - one who steals books

Calendula - any of a small genus (Calendula) of yellow-rayed composite herbs of temperate regions

Deipnosophist - a person skilled in table talk

Ductile - easily led or influenced; capable of being fashioned into a new form

Eremitic - characterized by ascetic solitude in mode of life

Imbibe - to take in or up; to receive into the mind and retain

Intellection - the act of the intellect or exercise of the intellect; a synonym of thought and reasoning

Jentacular - pertaining to breakfast

Obliquity - deviation from moral rectitude or sound thinking; indirectness or deliberate obscurity of speech or conduct

Pernoctate - to stay up or out all night

Saccade - a small rapid jerky movement of the eye especially as it jumps from fixation on one point to another (as in reading)

Solitudinarian - a person who leads a secluded or solitary life

Solivagant - rambling alone; marked by solitary wandering

Troglodyte - a member of any of various peoples (as in antiquity) who lived or were reputed to live chiefly in caves

Umbrageous - inclined to take offense easily, belligerent

Variegated - having discrete markings of different colors

Vestige - a trace, mark, or visible sign left by something (such as an ancient city or a condition or practice) vanished or lost

If any of these words make their way into your next poem/story, please tag me, or leave a link in the replies. I would love to read them!

More: Lists of Beautiful Words

[weltenwellen]

Louise Glück, from “”Averno“, Averno

[iloveabortions]

"Almond Blossoms" Vincent Van Gogh, 1890.

This painting came to life to celebrate the arrival of Van Gogh's nephew.

[filmnoirsbian]

07/29

[deanjohn]

Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams, “The Red Girl”

[nomenu]