I’m not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay

ieva / aquarius / lonewolf 90's child from Lithuania

[amouthfulloflove]

“To survive, I had to stay unfamiliar to myself, neutralized, at arm’s length. Sometimes, I think, all these years later, I’m still hunting the part of myself I exiled.”

Places I’ve Taken My Body; ‘The Broken Country: On Disability and Desire’ by Molly McCully Brown

[miroslawpruchnicki]

San River

Sanok, Poland 20-06-2020

[remanence-of-love]

[remanence-of-love]

[sunsbleeding]

[s-h-o-w-a]

Men laying under cherry blossoms. From the photobook ‘Kyo no Miyako’, Japan, 1960-70

by Seiryu Inoue

[thesingingknives]

“Lost in the forest one night, we find the body of a wolf, its throat torn open, the wound a cupful of rippling black milk, where maggots curl star-white in their glistening darkness. The eyes hum with flies, which drone a joy into the bones, the brain, wander into the labyrinth through the tongue, still hanging out in half-howl. We keep walking, holding out our hands to feel our way through the dark as if we could touch as it touches, know it as it knows the stars that float in the vacuum of its voice, that grow brighter and louder until it unsays them, takes them back. I know first there was light to give the void a shape. I know what has no beginning cannot end. I can hardly see your face out here but I can hear you breathing. Your voice opens and says I think the path is this way, floats out, crosses to me in a little cloud-boat and is gone— Keep talking. How did the story go? How dark it was inside the wolf, which had begun as a clump of darkness inside another wolf. Then the child climbed out its belly shining, without a name— with only a red cap by which to call her and the animal guts in her hands.”

— Sara Eliza Johnson, “Märchen” (as appears in Bone Map)

[9710144]

[exvertiente]

.

[lifeinpoetry]

                                                         surrender to the notes in our pulse

exhaust both pain and pleasure     

                                                         until, winded, we come up for air

— Airea D. Matthews, from “Rebel Fugue,” Simulacra

[lifeinpoetry]

“My whole life has been a hologram. / A history of body as bangled, begging / hand.”

— — Natalie Mesnard, from “Projection in Retrograde,” We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, eds. Andrea Abi-Karam & Kay Gabriel

[lifeinpoetry]

“Silence bleeds us to language. / Silence beats language out of us.”

— — Valzhyna Mort, from “To Ingeborg Bachmann in Rome,” Music for the Dead and Resurrected

[lifeinpoetry]

When I see blood, I promise blood.

What has kept us alive? Our death songs.

How did we scare God out of this place?

With things that God fears: a tongue, tied with a black ribbon of verse, a slice of bread used as a bookmark.

— Valzhyna Mort, from “Ode to Branca,” Music for the Dead and Resurrected

[lifeinpoetry]

                              Where language

is a dog on a chain of iron words, where punishment                        is a hundred lashes of silence.

— Valzhyna Mort, from “To Ingeborg Bachmann in Rome,” Music for the Dead and Resurrected

[lifeinpoetry]

Even clothed, it is unsafe to be anything but iron.

I will never           unlearn how to hide.

— Cait Weiss Orcutt, from “RESEDA,” VALLEYSPEAK

[lifeinpoetry]

Last night my life was so quiet that my feelings were audible. When the phone rang, I thought it was my heart.

— Ken Chen, from “Taipei Novel,” Juvenilia

[lifeinpoetry]

When summer ended / rain poured off the edge of elevated highways / and washed away the moon

I no longer have a sword / but sometimes at night I hold my keys between my fingers

I paint my lips /

I draw avalanches /

I light fires inside dream palaces /

I cut my hair over the bathroom sink /

— Nina Mingya Powles, from “Girl Warrior, or: watching Mulan (1998) in Chinese with English subtitles,” Magnolia, 木蘭