bells and pomegranates

[pinkfairiesteaparty]

[malisoun-deactivated20200727]

How do you fall back in love with life?

clean your room.  clean space, uncluttered space, space that doesn’t have miasma clinging to it can work wonders.  clean the dishes.  sweep.  take out the trash.  peel the clothes off the floor and wash them, and then actually fold/hang them.  take a long shower.  scrub behind your knees.  brush your teeth.  (this can be utterly exhausting, but try to get it done in a day, if you can.  the end result is worth it.)

pull out your notebook.  it doesn’t need to be a new notebook, but preferably one that you don’t usually write in, or that you haven’t touched in a while.  fuck moleskins.  the yellow legal pad will work fine.  sit in your room, or in the park, or in the library, and write a list.  count clouds.  describe all the colors that you see, and note patterns that arise.  sketch the cracks in the walls.  note the shape light makes when it enters a space.  talk about what the air tastes like, smells like.  what sounds are there?  even the white nose, break that down: air planes, fans, cicadas, anything.  remind yourself that you are sitting in the middle of a space brimming with detail.  remind yourself that you are not in nothingness and emptiness.  your world is fathomless.  it has potential.

drink cold water and try to eat something that isn’t processed.  it does not need to be fancy.  buy yourself an apple with the change between your couch cushions.  eat it outside.  if you’re someone who walks, walk somewhere afterwards, just to stretch your legs.  take your fucking meds.  remember that its a good thing that you are inside your body.  your body is a fantastic and endlessly intricate machine, and even though society has smacked a bunch of poisonous ideas on it, that doesn’t change its inherent worth and splendor.  take care of it.

read a novel.  underline your favorite lines, and write phrases that twist your heart inside your chest on the back of your hand with an ink pen.  read a novel like it’s poetry.  read poetry, something decadent but unpretentious.  watch a movie you haven’t seen before.  if there are free art galleries near you, walk through one.  take your time.  let yourself bask.  if there are patterns in what makes your soul ache, write those patterns down – marbles arches or soot crumbling bricks or dandelions or descriptions of dresses or whatever it is, write them down.

your chosen family is important.  remember, they picked you as much as you picked them.  the love has no obligation.  it is given freely and it is given from a place of compassion.  you are not a burden.  if you need to breathe, take a minute by yourself and just exist, but remember to go back to your people.  when they need you, listen and be gracious.  always be gracious.  the universe sometimes remembers things like that.

listen to new music.  link jump on youtube or related artist jump on spotify or ask the chap beside you in the cafe what their favorite band is, and listen to that.  listen to something that you don’t usually listen to.  we tend to tie up a lot of memory with music.  we are falling in love again.  the soundtrack needs to be specific to that.  

allow yourself to indulge in romantics.  press flowers in old books.  play movies with subtitles and mouth the words.  dance in your room.  wear something that makes you feel good, even if you wouldn’t wear it in public.  write your chosen family letters, even if you hand deliver them.  write poetry, even awful poetry.  revel in its awfulness.  eat dark chocolate and when your chosen family want to go out, try to go out with them sometimes, even if its just to the market.  

[teawithhoney-deactivated2020072]

[teawithhoney-deactivated2020072]

[aspiiro-deactivated20170220]

“Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.”- Wendell Johnson

With the half term in full swing, I took some time to sit down and note what I could do different the next term. After racking my brains, this is what I came up with. These are all the things that I’m going to try  in fact, things that I’m going to do next term.I might even print it out and stick it on my wall so that I remember to do it! 

Anyway, remember to do work over the half term however also to take a well earned break because this is what half terms are for. It’s for you to take a break and recharge your batteries so that you can karate chop the next term! 

Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I say things like “karate chop”? T_T

[bellsandpomegranate]

i miss you every single day. i imagine you in all of the spaces of my life that could be made brighter by you. i think there’s a reason we reach for each other throughout our lives. i think that we’re made of stars. i think of the way my body craved for you. i think of how much we’ve changed. i think we’ll come full circle.

[bellsandpomegranate]

on falling in love with fish

that by starlight of black devils and black wolves some nest from which escapes he who dreams with a cloak of ignorance.

the sea has broken russet for these cracked brains, great conquering black eyes nubile and full-blooded, his brow terrible and sweet you melted to him, a small rustle of wings into the deep ocean. under your white skin and the murmuring waters, are unfathomable space into which the ferocious tide rips; i have seen maelstroms eternal.

of the sea, star-infused and entranced in pallid flotsam, drowned men sank down into abysses.

[bellsandpomegranate]

RED

take this to your grandmother, her mother says.

she does not hear her.

between pulling the legs

from flies and crushing their bodies between small fingers.

she knows how to talk of dead girls

has heard of the girls in her class that walked too close to train tracks

and of cars that took them out of the world

angry that they didn’t look left right left before stepping.

so take this to your grandmother.

walk through the woods, red.

sleeved-shirt a jjjjjslash against the soft, dark rot of trees.

no one knows of the power of ovaries.

don’t talk about the wonders your body can do.

it’s not dinner conversation.

twigs don’t snap.

she walks through the forest where she’s hidden too many times,

and does not feel fear.

she knows the way a body feels under hers,

knows the curvature of intestines

knows the new testament and all of its misgivings.

there is no god here, on the kitchen floor at nine post morning.

the wolf didn’t actually eat her out of spite.

she tangled fingers in fur and looked into its eyes and knew the feeling of hunger.

with lolling tongue and jaws, she was snapped like a blood vessel inside his mouth,

bloody rivulets over white-stained fur,

a communion.

and the next morning,

she was fur auburn,

jagged claws,

and a sunrise.

in the head like a kick

through splendid cities

with fair hair

and her sweet madness

did each touch come

on each skull

raspberry and strawberry.

god sings and the wolves sing

in a great wooden chariot

like an organ of iron

the animals entwine—

their thin arms on the

delighted earth, in her path.

the black gallows of

city streets

where the stars are sleeping

inside dreams that smile of beautiful lips

and streaked by the heavy wave of

her great veils, satin rising

and with the blood of green trees

she nails enemies to naked colored

hurricanes.

she had never endured more triumphant clamor

than when the low-hanging sun, speckled her skin

and the forest trembled to feel

her clawed hand across the twisted trees.

[baby-paw]

we are moving in place

This one is for you. For when you told me that it was okay to shake apart. I pressed fingertips into your pressure points and maybe you siphoned away the pain away from me in those autumn nights we spent laying on the grass and wiggling when the dew seeped into our shirts, the august moons unbuttoned at the front and splayed wide open like the underbelly of something we never knew. If I was a feather you were the constant wind ruffling me and challenging me to be angry. to be sad or upset. you wanted me to get upset. because that meant the walls would come down, and secretly I wanted to be upset, too. This one is for all the summers you spent growing up in your sun room and running through the back woods, catching frogs and hoping things wouldn’t catch you. all the mosquito bites you were taught me to x out, and every one was something new. all the days where you went to bed smelling like mud and sometimes koolaid, something sharp and sweet under all the bad. this one is for me, too. because sometimes I fell in love with strangers in passing cars and all I could think at the age of six is how I didn’t fit in with where I’d been placed. the creaking of the floorboards under sun-warmed feet and fingers curled loosely around ribs that were waking slow and translucent in the blocks of sunlight from high windows, and every glass of coffee was another five minutes until you had to leave. I never believed in storybooks but I believed in you and the way your eyes burned gold and I never wanted anything more than your stunted efforts. I fell in love with what I thought you could be at one-hundred percent instead of what you were without trying. so now I send letters across the ocean and they go there instead of to you where there was someone always waiting for me. i remember tangling my fingers into my horse’s mane and thinking if you were anything like i’d imagined, we would do much better than our parents’ generation of fathers hiding feelings and hotel room keys under mattresses and black-dirty hurt under doorways built from notches of “yournamehere – age 7 or 8 or 9.” So I loved you and you realized you didn’t love girls, and I just keep thinking about you standing on milk crates to pick apples in the rare sunlight with your hair around your waist and your secret potluck smile.

[bellsandpomegranate]

tomato cells

The summer I turned sixteen I worked

long days into long purple nights on the tomatoes.

Burnished with sunlight

and golden from it, I too

learned with the tomatoes 

that out

of doors, night slips

and gives glimpses of

real life. 

Room

and body both hot under dresses,

and moonlight playing in three-act dances,

across walls smelling of rosewater

my body and my tomatoes grew from stubs.

their red and swollen shells

burning like red clay.

 And like this is began to happen

Tomatoes and I grew, the way the a spruce

flourishes in the cold; them saying

Here we are, the seeds

of your dream

come away with us.

[bellsandpomegranate]

laura palmer

i saw her on the street today,

laura, with her white stockings and checkered wool jumper-- an apparition. that’s what they would call it. 

after laura washed up on the shore we started realizing about the secret worlds hiding inside of everyone, and the sudden loss of our ability to hide. quickly we got into the habit dirty and selfless of letting people take and take from us until we had nothing left inside. the adults cradled with thorny hands the children they reared love-lessly until, stretching, adolescence broke free and tumbled out in razor-white lines and folds of used lingerie.

laura was standing by the old café, holding hands to her throat and grinning, saccharine, bloody teeth the works. She saw me and grinned harder as if she wanted to split her mouth at the seams and swallow herself whole.

she’s been dead for two years and I still see laura palmer.

[earthyday]

[strawberrywhinee-deactivated201]

;

[bellsandpomegranate]

poems for girls made of blood

i.

when the world burns to the ground all I will be able to think about is how my heart stopped when she first touched my hand.

the churches will be burning and our lungs will be acrid but her hair was dark and it was 6PM when I finally got there and I laid awake all night afraid to touch her and I felt like she was made of glass.

to this day I’m still afraid to look away from my gps for more than thirty seconds lest I be thrust into Connecticut cornfields and the great clamouring of Boston traffic

ii.

I ate the food with Brazilian spices and she was sitting across from me like she couldn’t believe we were sharing the same air.

I didn’t need wine because I was drunk already and proximity fucking kills after separation but if this is true what does it say about the fact that I don’t need hands on me to feel trapped but with her I was never trapped and she is still made from the sun at night I dream about seatbelts and diners and always, always laying beside her at night very still and afraid I would be wrenched away from her—that her mother would come in and see us laying so close after being so far apart and if I could go back I would do it all again take her in my hands and remold myself to fit with her

iii.

this isn’t selfish-- selfish is how I left books under her pillow to force her to think of me when I was gone selfish is how I never asked if she found them selfish is how I still dream of her and tell myself, north---north is home, home is 300 miles, home is gone, home is still there with a pulse and a bleeding body and hips like the atlas guide folded up in my glovebox always waiting for use.

[jeffstockwell]