but do you hold your loved ones?

do you feel like a home to them?

[exitwound]

Whoreoboros

[exitwound]

69

[exitwound]

Whoreoboros

[stretchbrock]

The only “serial” I know anything about is Rice Krispies! SERIAL MOM (1994) dir. John Waters

[sci-fi-gifs]

Paradise Hills (2019), dir. Alice Waddington

[women-loving-art]

“Through my eyes, like through two wounds, I feel you… and ache…”

— Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904. (via megairea)

[firstfullmoon]

“There is only one heart in my body, have mercy / on me.”

— Franz Wright, from “One Heart,” in Walking to Martha’s Vineyard

[hungryblueghost]

"Geryon did not want to become one of those people who think of nothing but their stores of pain." —Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

[barrrrrrs]

“The woman who cherished

her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.

I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,

but I want to go on from here with you

fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.”

Adrienne Rich

[soracities]

“…and they scream, but this screaming, this darkness, their mouths and their eyes cannot be spoken of now, only circumambulated with words, like a beggar with his palm extended, for this darkness and this screaming, these mouths and these eyes cannot be compared to anything, for they have nothing in common with anything that can be put into words…”

— László Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below (trans. Ottilie Muzlet)

[luthienne]

Kaveh Akbar, from Calling a Wolf a Wolf; "Soot"

(transcription below cut)

Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust, / chewing away a chain link fence or mariner’s knife. / From up so close we must seem / clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers // undressing in front of each other / for the first time. Regarding loss, I’m afraid / to keep it in the story, / worried what I might bring back to life, // like the marble angel who woke to find / his innards scattered around his feet.

[violentwavesofemotion]

“Have you ever noticed when you’re tired, your fingers don’t grip things as tightly as they should? That things slip through them more often than you wish? I feel as though I am those fingers and life is slipping through me.”

— Kelsey Danielle, Life And Other Things (via violentwavesofemotion)

[aconissa]

Poet James Schuyler to painter John Button (Spring 1956) 

[oldmanatom]

[ID: transcript of a letter from poet James Schuyler to painter John Button, written in the spring of 1956:

Dear John,

I don’t know why I have to tell you this today (but I do) — perhaps it’s because when I look out into the fog all I can see is the hairs of your adorable chest. I’m terribly in love with you, and have been for such a long time, ever since the first time Frank took me to your apartment. I looked around at your beautiful paintings and suddenly everything I’d ever felt about you turned into a diamond or a rose or something — anyway I went striding up and down while Frank played Poulenc and felt exactly like the Ugly Duckling the day he found he was a swan.

Then you came home and I didn’t think I could ever look at you or to you again, all I could do was giggle and snort and twitch. But I’ve looked at you a lot since then, and there isn’t anybody else in the world I want to look at; or want, for that matter.

It seems to me that I’ve been so GOOD that I couldn’t hate myself more. I don’t see why I couldn’t have been born a robber baron type instead of a fool.

Now I’m going down and set 57th Street on fire to keep you warm.

This is all nonsense. I love being in love with you, it makes even unhappiness seem no bigger than a pin, even at the times when I wish so violently that I could give my heart to science and be rid of it.

With all my love, Jimmy

/ID]

[vympr]

i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you're also grieving for yourself a little bit

[petrichara]

‘There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.’

-Anne Carson, ‘Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides’

[butchniqabi]

And My Father's Love Was Nothing Next To God's Will by Amatullah Bourdon

[butchniqabi]

This poem....this poem took the tumblrinas by STORM. I didn't realize at the time it would be my most popular work to date. I wrote this in basically one sitting and made minimal edits. I don't quite remember what inspired me to write about Abraham (AS) and Isaac, but this poem is really about my own relationship with my father. As a muslim, I *should* have written about Ismail, but the relationship between Ismail and Ibrahim (AS) in (some interpretations of) the Quran is much more equal as Ibrahim (AS) asks Ismail his permission to sacrifice him. I read an islamic scholar's interpretation of the binding of Isaac that Abraham (AS) had been tricked into believing his dream was from God (SWT) and so went forward with the sacrifice and had to be stopped by God (SWT).

Anyways, glad this prompted so many edits and web weaving posts!

[metamorphesque]

— Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

[barbie2023]

washing machine heart (2018) || should’ve been me (2022)

[firstfullmoon]

“And I knew then those things that happened so long ago must have happened, but not to us. No, I don’t think people could go on living if they had lived those things.”

— Raymond Carver, from “The Windows of the Summer Vacation Houses”

“The story is not all mine, not told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.”

— Ursula K. LeGuin, from The Left Hand of Darkness

“It has a story, but I am in it. So are you. And to realise this is a moment of some sadness. When we are denied a story, a light goes off.”

— Anne Carson, from “The Anthropology of Water”

“I find value in thinking in stories. Aren’t we all woven through with stories? Isn’t that how we think of our lives, how we survive them?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch, from “Woven”

“I told my version—faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind. And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”

— Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“My friends tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to us, […] These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe.”

— Margaret Atwood, from “Marrying the Hangman”

“You want to keep retelling my story. But it’s my story. It’s not yours. You can’t just make things up because you’d like it better if I had been braver, […] It happened to me, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s the only thing that ever happened to me. I own it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente, from “Red Girl”

“I can’t give you facts I can’t distill my history into this or that home truth and go plunging ahead composing miniature versions of the cosmos to fill the slots in your question and answer […] everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories”

— Anne Carson, from “The Mimnermos Interviews”

[weltenwellen]

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998