Out There

Here and There

[inkskinned]

she was like being punched in the mouth. you felt her for days after. you ached because of her. felt her on your teeth. she was a sweetness you never forgot. what i’m saying is that somewhere out there she’s dancing around with somebody else. her body is like a feline, all waves, all fine lines. she moves like a moonbeam. what i’m saying is that she’s out forgetting me and i’m pretending that’s okay because it has to be. isn’t that funny.

[jupiterreed]

i. i beg you, be my only. i’ve never gotten life right. life, to me, is like getting a needle through a thread, but your thread binds me. san francisco summer and four years later i heard you still like the smell of pomegranates. i heard our time here is indefinite. i heard the ocean last night, emulating your pulse. i heard fall into me, fall into me.

ii. i drink to remember. your hands and the trajectories of desire, your mouth—in glimpses aflame with it. your eyes reminders of why anyone looks to the stars. i get that i’m clingy, that i keep writing poems about every constellation that marks you. but i could live inside your shirt forever, i could become holy and pray for a morning, where you mistake my skin for a bruised peach & take another bite.

iii. i grew up in a church. i grew up facing god— the light won’t touch me anymore. not since you. 

iv. it means nothing if the poet said “i lost a friend.“ the poet is hollow. it remains to be seen if this is because of august or if the poet has always been empty.

v. i keep having repetitive dreams of rotten apples or overripe tangerines, gardens full of decaying mushrooms, disembodied roses drifting in polluted rivers and shredded moth’s wings. you ask me to quit with the metaphors— but i never told you that’s what they were. please don’t say you love me back || j.r 

[verrloren-deactivated20191031]

e (ii)

i wish i could pull you out of my lungs / pull your name out of my chest / throw it on the pavement / stomp it out like a cigarette / but you know, ashes can still start a fire / and so i’ll tend to the flames / i’ll let them burn my entire house down

i can say i don’t want to see you / tell my wednesday tongue to starve / let your name fizzle out on my tastebuds / but you will always be next to me / your peach palms a foot away / your cherry tongue / the forbidden fruit

my red hunger, gnawing / at the center of my chest

[kmarx]

[timbllr]

[aikaleegrave]

the story behind a random tarot card // napowrimo prompt by @angelealowes

[sunsounds]

to may,

sun-drenched honey dripping fingers over my mouth / and do you ever consider it like that, / a small, thoughtless thing and its wings caught in itself. / do you ever consider it like - / a bee weighted down under glazed molten gold. / i feel like a bee, the dusk trembling through champagne clouds, / i feel like a thoughtless thing suffocated.

say there is a home somewhere, and i am tumbled through a tornado, / say the tornado has wrapped spindled webs around my wrists and sank me into a fairytale land, / sank me into something that warps a sickle of a smile at kansas and refuses it, / and i am simply dorothy but i can’t find my ruby heels glimmering like beads of blood under sunlight. / say i become a savage, hopeless thing that cannot find its way home / but there is a home somewhere.

may, my may / tell me there is home. / tell me.

my mother clasps a palm onto my forehead and says i am hanuman-ji / says i am divine but caught into something mortal, something i cannot understand / says i have forgotten who i am. / i have never believed in virgin mary, not like i believe in this. / my mother glances a palm over my forehead and i wonder if i could swallow the sun like my teeth sharp over a mango / if i am hanuman-ji, tell me i can be greedy, / gobbling up the sun until the scorching juices are trailing at the corners of my mouth. / tell me my lungs would fill over with warmth.

may, darling may, / i am tired. / i want to be secular tonight / a corpse and the antithesis of holy.

may, oh may, / tell me i can rest tonight, / please.

a letter to may // written for @neongodsnetwork‘s prompts week 3

[morticiaatoms]

June, July. Months like honey; sweet and viscous. Easy to swallow but hard to wash away. Red wine from mason jars, olives in pairs, bare feet and bare chests under a blanket of stars and morning dew. Wandering in and out of bookstores, pulling cobwebs off of bookshelves by day and clavicles by night. August arrives like an unwelcome visitor and leaves just as swiftly; I start taking notice of empty space and I only eat olives one by one. I’ve barely had enough time to pluck the flower petals from my hair and wash the grass stains from my pants before I am reminded that the approaching season is not as kind to bare feet as the last. The sun sets earlier here, the days seem to effortlessly shed inches from their waists and I am slightly tormented by the idea that nothing is stopping me from doing the same. In September I replace spoonfuls of honey with swigs of apple cider vinegar. I am walking on eggshells, feeling too much about feeling too little, misplacing things - words, especially. I am surrounded by people who count their lovers like freckles and peel love like summer skin; but waiting for you feels natural, like whatever it is that inspires us to lie in bathtubs for so long after the water drains.

[morticiaatoms]

We meet again.

[brennatwohy]

Swallowtail, by Brenna Twohy

[inkskinned]

hey honey the clock stops around you did you know that i mean when the air sucks out of the room i always know to turn to you. i been up and down and out of my mind and every place i ran to was a place you knew how to find. i’m saying that i didn’t get the point of poetry until i heard it falling from your lips. you bright light, ink child, daughter of the sun who cracked open my ribs and called down “are you home” and woke up love. i wanna tattoo the moon phases on my palm so i always have your number so i can call you at midnight and ask “is this art or what” and you can come over and cup your hands and make stuff glow like you’re so good at. you could turn a weed into a wildflower patch, take your sorrow and turn it gentle on everybody who visits; fixed me in a poem and held yourself over my lips and made sense of all of it.

[waltzinghardcore]

@inkskinned if you were wondering how it turned out here is my gift, and thank you so much honestly

[inkskinned]

god i support the fuck out of you both im weeping

[sunsounds]

08.24.2018 (x)

[aavillainess]

sunshine yellow on a foggy morning or dark night like the brightest stars in the darkness of after. i wonder if they envy your brightness or watch in awe as you walk beneath them, a homing beacon for their eyes on earth. you’re a bit too much like the sun, i don’t think anyone could ever look at you directly, too many layers, too much of you overfilling the brim of your smile. it’s like melting under southern heat, you miss it when the chill bites in the slightest. i think you’re a city girl born into a meadow heart valley, too much beauty for the big city, hidden away like a gem in the dust of crowds trying to dull your shine. - celestial body on earth for @softheartedpoet (aavillainess)

[lukecohoon]

ii.

i’ve been growing demons under my skin for years now. they keep saying boy keep your mind out of the gutter that’s where the dirty things live and you, you are not dirty, you just leave your mess everywhere like drops of blood and pomegranate seeds. black under all my fingernails, bruises on bruises on bruises, like every sunset on every horizon all at once. starved myself for love for years. thank god for small mercies. summer is limping behind me, I cut him off at the knees: I plan on burying him later. hide what I do in the light. tired of letting him lace up my boots, brush my hair, yawn, fall asleep in candle scented rooms: the amount of blood was startling. there are sharper objects, why did you bring your heart to a knife fight?

[ivyburied]

ivyburied | e.k.

[ivyburied]

I. WHERE DO DREAMS GO WHEN WE STOP DREAMING THEM

i’m dreaming about a boy gutting a fish under the blaze of a red rising sun (red like hunger, red that has teeth and claws & is the kind of monster that lives under your bed) / the guts spill out over his hands & he’s trying to put them back in with needle & thread. i am stitching myself into this dream & he is stitching up the fish & we are both successful but you can still see where the needle broke us.

II. FIFTEEN & GODLESS & LEARNING TO DIE TOO YOUNG

i want the virginia creekwater to wash over me river-mouthed & something holy but all i hear is the creak of floorboards that hide forgotten things. i thought the trees would shelter me but there are bodies hanging from the branches & a coffin in the earth beneath & i’m not sure whose coffin it is. the blackbirds tell me i wouldn’t want to know anyway. / i want to pull apart the years. i want to unswallow the bullet. i want to take my heart & bury it under the roots of that willow tree so that i cannot hurt it anymore.

III. I AM NOT A GIRL. I AM THE IMPLICATION OF A GIRL CARVED OUT OF EMPTY SPACE.

mornings are raw & none of my friends understand this which is to say that they have never been desperately aching for the lack of cold before / there is a bruise on the bony part of my arm & i am pressing at it too much (i never knew when to leave well enough alone). the blood is pooled underneath & too close to the surface & maybe it will spill over in the night. it’s a sign i’m alive & it’s a sign i’m dying but somehow i’m still aching with someone else’s grief.

IV. SUICIDE TASTES LIKE BLUE

cyanide sounds a lot like cyan & that’s why it’s a blue word / blue like lavender smoke & the empty highway at three in the morning & my mother’s sad arms. does she know i weep for her? does she know she is losing her only daughter? i wait for the year to pass & i make a promise to myself to stay alive but it’s one year later & i’m still writing suicide notes into my skin. i’m still seeing chemical poisoning in the neon blue of an empty swimming pool as i submerge myself / so i take the cyan & i take the cyanide & stuff both down my throat until my lungs are choking with blue paint. let them. i’m still halfway between breathing & not.

// ANTHEM FOR THE DOOMED YOUTH OF THIS GENERATION | e.k.

[exit152]

T & I on a Saturday night, drinking u under the table & I think I’m more in love with the moment than I am with u. I always feel like I belong in ur space. Our tiny family, never sober, always going home. doesn’t matter. ill still cry. I’ll still break my own heart. it’s what I know how to do. but I like when we sleep, & in the morning when we part the blinds & u tell me the weather. ur so pretty in the winter shock. I’m sorry for thinking these nice things abt u. sorry for never wanting anything tht u want at the same exact time. the world is cold & frozen & I am writing u a letter from the time machine in my heart. I’m crouching in last year. I’m holding our hands over the radiator. I’m singing park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream abt me. oh, please, dream abt me. Or at least, think about me a little bit more. Just a little. Then smile, or bare ur teeth. Same thing. I promise when u see me we’ll forget to be fair. I only kno how we treat each other, touching ur face in the club, saying how we don’t mean to, but we can’t stop thinking about why it won’t work out.

[exit152]

opening disposables where ur smiling at me, or for the camera. those are the same things.