sereno

she/her | fledgling personal writing blog | weee don't really know what we're doing here yet

[forsereno]

Love Poem

Let us be ocean and coast, a taking into and over one another: shifting sediment, a breaking down

of rock: dredge and deposit. A series of prepositions meaning proximity, although the most of us extends away

from one another. Once, in winter, I ventured far inland, forgot the crash of gravity pulling you over me

and away—forgot there is a place where we meet and retreat but never let go. Let this be a moment of remembering,

my love, as I stand at the edge of myself, cliff and sea grass and the screaming gull above, sighting your breadth to the horizon.

Donika Kelly from The Renunciations

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She Sure Can Ride

Mark Maggiori

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got hit by a train full of bricks (good bricks)

yesterday someone, a writer I respect, asked me if I spoke another language. my reflexive response is usually yes, the most useless one (please, no offense intended; it's me being very self-effacing), german

was that my first language?

no, haha, I lived there for a year and spoke it (fluently, for a while), and haven't used it since...

she said she could tell because I did some of her favorite things in writing, something she noticed from multilingual writers

and I thanked her, and stuttered about how maybe we all transmit and pick up signals, and it's a shared thing, just different 🤷‍♀️ and went to bed

and this morning, I thought of a little fifth-grader who, because she was weird and lonely and a little fucked-up, started teaching herself german with a used berlitz book, and when teachers found out, she got to walk to the high school over lunch and sit behind football players, who then asked for her help with their homework (which led to more classes and that year abroad...somewhat beside the point)

and realized how our tracks are laid without us realizing it

I suddenly felt love, for the *first time*, for that little fifth grader

I'm a mess

she was sweet and brave and lonely and weird and lived in fantasy worlds for company and stimulation in a small town, and wrote a story called "a nation torn" 😂🥹 as a sixth grader and never got love she deserved from herself

I'm a mess, and grateful to her, and wish I could give her a big hug tell her it'll be okay, and someday people will like her stories

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las soladeras, early 1900s

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From Joy Sullivan's Instructions for Traveling West: Poems, Dial Press Trade Paperback, April 9, 2024

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Big Freedia, inspo for Zelle

photo credit Rolling Stone

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Norman's chart of the lower Mississippi River,

Scale ca. 1:140,000. Alternate title: From Natchez to New Orleans. Hand colored. Cadastral map showing landowners. LC copy 2 imperfect: Piec

This is a map, dated 1858, both loathsome and informative if, like me, you're researching the aftermath of this period and are diving deeper. Norman's Chart is a map of the lower Mississippi, depicting the plots of plantations along the river. You see the crossover from cotton to sugar. Look closer, and you see mileage from one place to another along that sigmoid river. The family names you can surely look up. Places where those stately old homes stood or still stand, used now as wedding venues and tourist sites, sadly very few of them seriously showing us the horror that really transpired on that land. The sheer magnitude - zoom in and you'll see - is staggering.

[saloongirls]

“In the Warmth of the Setting Sun” by Glenn Dean, oil paint | via Landscapes of the West

[boonesfarmsangria]

Beyond the Golden Skies

Mark Maggiori || Legacy Art Gallery 2023 Show

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We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

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The nurse Helen, she understands her.

She says Water is life!

when she brings her pills and her water cup and gives me the look, her working look;

tells me how she - 103 - is anxious now

pounding on her walls

and she says four words at a time now.

I count them on my fingers when she babbles.

They curl in like

I'm trying to hold

on to running water

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as invested as I am in finishing X, I'm happy the ember is still going somewhere for my two main personal projects. manon and mamzelle and irene all alive and well. this time of year I wish I were back in new orleans, and I miss the air, of all things. the old air.

my brothers, also alive and well in my heart. I miss west texas for them. and, oddly, pockets of what smell like ozone, while driving through hill country. so unmistakably sweet and fresh, I drove with windows down just hoping to catch it.

find myself needing more strength to finish redbird before coming back to the others, but at least they're there.

[whitehotel]

E.J. Bellocq, Untitled, Storeyville oortraits, #17 (1911-13)

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