horror vacui

fear of the empty

[clementinevonradicspoems]

“I buy all your favorite foods so I will be ready when you come home because once I did this and you said “This is how I know you love me.” I go on long walks alone and think about a poem my friend wrote that goes “This is how you die by distance.” I hum the sound of the dial tone under my breath. I stare at my hands and wonder at their uses. I consider pawning my thighs. I consider auctioning off my hip bones. I put my breasts in a box on the top shelf of the closet. I do not need them now. I think of all the thing I have to tell you when I will see you. Stories like: I just found out pumpkins are technically fruits and Cary Grant’s first job was in a traveling circus and Most mammals are born able to walk and learn to run within minutes, so we are not crazy for moving so fast. This morning I wrote your name in the steam on my mirror, even though I knew it would fade within minutes. In my best notebook I wrote “I miss you” ten thousand times. I wrote “I think I am missing one of my ribs” I wrote “I envy the way leaves know exactly when to fall from the branches and when to come back in the spring” I wrote “Everyone else isn’t you. It turns out that’s a huge problem for me.””

— Clementine von Radics, Things I Do When I Cannot Hold You

[halcyonpoems]

Loss is voiceless, tongueless,

salted liver can’t be cruel—

we’re the ones who make loss so

our grief—our despair—

We twist stuffed stockings with gummy wrists

we wreck our hankerchiefs

coming to terms with nature

should be no great matter

Do you love Emily Dickinson as I do?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMar 4, 2023

[classicbooks101]

I have mourned in the past but only now have I touched grief's core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts.

Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[classicbooks101]

"Never" has come to stay. "Never" feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[rot-bunny]

- henry scott holland (1847-1918)

[fairydrowning]

-Trillium by Louise Gluck

[dionyrtal]

"Evergreen Departure" by Dion Anja, from Motion Sickness

You can support my writing by purchasing a copy!

[fearoftheempty]

grief is just love with no place to go.

[fairydrowning]

-Heidi Priebe, As Long As There Is Love, There Will Be Grief

[TEXT ID: The grief of time passing, of life moving on half-finished, of empty spaces that were once bursting with the laughter and energy of people we loved. As long as there is love there will be grief because grief is love's natural continuation. It shows up in the aisles of stores we once frequented, in the whiff of cologne we get two years after they've been gone. Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, "LOVE WAS HERE". In the finer print, quietly, "LOVE STILL IS". END ID]

[virginiewoolf]

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

[fearoftheempty]

All of a sudden, you’re gone

and I can’t find the right words

to describe the hollow echo

your name now leaves behind.

Grief tastes like a mouthful of metal.

Your pillow is cold but always soft

and your memory feels like air

i can’t breathe.

[fearoftheempty]

Closure is a myth; an ideological narrative consumed by the hungry, lonely human beings haunted by ghosts of their love affairs with life. The why’s and the how’s that make sense of the senseless and bring peace to the pained are lies fed to the starving; famished and fiendish, they are gluttons for fish stories: waxing nostalgia and waiting with bated breath for fiction to fill them. My closure comes from the front door closing behind you, on your way out.

Mythopeia, (2013). revised, originally posted here.

[fearoftheempty]

You asked where was the girl

you met standing by the bar

you can not see, but hear

sitting inside, standing alone,

but with your pride.

who was she? this ghost

alone she is quiet. well-mannered.

like a chosen-child, an object in abject,

sitting in-between the bear and the alien

on the chilly middle pane of glass,

I suppose her selection

was more about luck than skill,

but still that cold iron claw came

from the ceiling, with a quick buzz and a hum.

A win is a win.

No matter how you cut

your losses. With a knife or a spoon

full of sugar and broken glass.

Do you want to be happy,

or do you want to be right?

Sometimes, it’s a choice.

They aren’t always the same.

I would choose to end here, the spoken words

of a girl gone, lost,

spent and exhausted. Out of reasons to

reason why to justify

trying to survive.

But he will not make the connection.

How can you ask for someone

you yourself traded

alone, in the night, high and drunk

for a reason to live?

You asked and received

and you find yourself looking

for happiness

in a place

you had

it

and lost it

again.

[museifushindoushugi]

practice self-crit it’s healthy

[museifushindoushugi]

and by that i dont mean like “oh im stupid and awful” I mean like, thinking about how your past belief systems were flawed, what pitfalls you fell into and how you fell into them and accepting all of that for what it is

[lifeinpoetry]

The good girl is always a ghost, / the body is always a wound.

Anne Champion, from “Bettie Page and the Wisdom of Old Age,” published in Muzzle (via lifeinpoetry)

[fearoftheempty]

can i move mountains? maybe one, this one studry and fixed on the horizon; i think it's flat or perhaps empty as the clouds that spit rain and cough dusty earth at its peak, its zenith, apex and tippity top. sigh, but alas it barley budged. not an inch or more to this old volcanous rock. maybe, if i squint: it remains, fuzzy and out of focus, just as it came. no mountains are moving from my mind's eye; i confess this wasn't the hard work i had intended. but if i can't see past past my mount everest, the rest is just rhetoric.

[conceptualsolitude]

concept: i don’t hurt. i’m not lying

[fearoftheempty]

concept: utopia.

[conceptualsolitude]

concept: we discover the last discoverable planet. it’s empty. we’re really alone here

[fearoftheempty]

I might be looking for profundity in an infinite mundanity; I am aware that Nothing is always a possibility. It is almost tragically beautiful that we cannot see in the dark. I hope that makes sense to someone other than myself one day.