the sound of silence caught between broken teeth

trapping words in writing from torn napkins and scraps of smiles original work tagged #gnashing

[luminote]

The poet exists in fragments, so does the poetry.

[glasswaters]

On the day of my birth, my mother gave to me the funeral shroud she'd been weaving her whole life — seafoam and salt, and the pressure of the ocean floor. An oyster-mouth, holding just underneath a weary tongue something foreign.

I do not remember her voice. The recall comes in waves, building and breaking and bubbling overhead: the swipe of a hand, a flash of teeth, the delicate fabric and the way her tail twitched whenever the sea lay still and sunlit, and entirely clear.

The fluttering of her gills against my cheek.

On the day of my death, my sisters gave to me their desperate, wailing hands. From within the cresting of the waves, they reached me, already halfway in the grave.

Mother's legacy around my shoulders and in my eyes, and holding the shards of my heart together with hands that knew nothing, with a tongue so withered it might as well have fused into the soft wanting of my throat, I was already spilling blood down the side of the ship.

There is a haze over my eyes, mother mine, and through it, everything looks too far away to touch. This fabric is cool, and soft, and I know every turn and fold of it. Years I have spent handling it, years I have spent looking for you in between the weft and the warp.

Mother-of-pearl, lay yourself around the shapes I cannot deny. Keep apart my mouth, and crawl into my gills. Build yourself, layer upon layer, around this stupid wanton heart, preserve for posterity, if you will, the fingerprints and the teeth marks, and the ache.

I am, blood and all, my mother's issue. I am, teeth and all, spread open for my father's grief.

[writtenoffantihero]

Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year

Google says it’s no different than checking IDs at the airport.

This is just another form of censorship, control of what we can/can't see and engage with, and another means of getting our private information.

[monarchofmonsters]

Alternative forks of AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) which are not maintained by Google and will not be affected by this:

LineageOS (I use this one)

Graphene OS

Functionally they are virtually identical to stock Android. Android began as an open-source project, and these versions are built off of that.

Fuck Google.

[mordcore]

[amiibo-king]

for those like me who cannot install alternative android forks on their phone because the phone in question is thoroughly unrootable, I would recommend downloading anyapk on your phone while you still can. In their own words:

anyapk is a lightweight Android application installer that bypasses Google's developer verification requirements by using local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) connections. Smoothly install any APK file on your device without restrictions, gatekeepers, or corporate approval.

If you're reading this after Google's lockdown date and are unable to install anyapk the regular way, there is a method outlined on the github linked above which tells you how to install anyapk on your phone by plugging it into a computer with ADB installed on it. Once you have anyapk on your phone, you will not have to do that ever again (unless you delete anyapk off your phone)

[aromanticbastards]

[Description for the first image:

a tweet by @/Pirat_Nation:

From September 2026, all apps, including those outside the Play Store, must come from verified developers.

No more anonymous sideloads. No quick comebacks for malware gangs.

First: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand.

end description]

[chromalogue]

[Description for the second image: a post from jrepin that reads:

"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware.

--Eugen Rochko of Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115093185284473606]

[metamorphesque]

i'm all the people i've ever loved

loseness lines over time by olivia de recat, @i-wrotethisforme, Kaveh Akbar, Olivie Blake

[endcant]

my most "i dont know" ass annual reflection. unfortunately, the end of march caught me while i was depressed.

i've been really lucky, i know it, and all the time i try to be more grounded. i try to be grateful, but i’m angry. grounding in the present during a time like this is harsh. it feels really ugly, and i'm getting tired of ugly feelings. i brush over the top of the topic of christian nationalism here-- past tdov posts go more into the religious trauma shit. @tdovcave

this year i'm touching the shit i generally avoid in my tdov posts which is the racial aspect of my experience yayyy. that is familial. like i was raised conservative and didn't stay that way, so i look back on absurd bullshit with a laugh, but it's not really healed? and it kind of gets worse all the time as things get worse in exactly the way i've worried about for so long?

i hope i don't have to tell you that i don't actually approve of the idea of "improving the race" if you caught onto me mentioning that. i'll let you know it is something that did really come up when i was growing up, the idea that a brown girl is meant to try to marry a white man to make whiter kids. i have a lot of resentment for this kind of delusionally racist hispanic behavior on some american-nationalist meets spanish-colonialist bullshit, as if being a bigger shithead could protect someone from racism.

along with the present-day escalation in fascism against immigrants and people of color and lgbtq+ people, i think of these things because this year is the 10th anniversary of the Pulse shooting. The Pulse shooting was a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida during Latin night. the victims were largely gay Latinos. i remember i was listening to hamilton when i heard about it (very 2016, i know, but it's true), and the musical's george washington was singing, "everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid. they'll be safe in the nation we made." and i cried because, you know, i was young and i had thought... i don't know. i guess, really, i hadn't thought. but now i knew the promise wasn't for me. you know?

i felt really betrayed, back before pain felt like noise.

[endcant]

reminder that you can read my tdov posts in order on tdovcave

[inkskinned]

i. recently i have been thinking too much about who gets to decide what constitutes "violence". as a term, it seems innately self-describing. almost like a natural fear, violence feels like the shiver of a rattlesnake: we would know violence, surely, if it was shown to us. and if there is violence, there would be someone committing that violence.

ii. my body is the present-tense subject of past-tense violence. it can be odd to sit in a class and be discussed as a statistic, a number rather than a participant. why is it that the discourse around assault always feels so academic? removed from the experience and safely clinical, the topic seems almost erudite, hypothetical. in this way, i almost feel separated from the actual memory: on the page, the word assault is too clean for what actually happened to me. the censorship on social media agrees with me: we can't even language what's happening, it would be too affronting for advertising.

iii. the ruling class determines how violence is assessed and how it is narrated. this is obvious and also too-incredible to summarize: capitalism is at the heart of so much passive violence. burning a warehouse is called "violent" by the ruling class, but poverty wages are not violent. protesting ice is "violent", but the actual actions taken by the federal government (and by police forces) are never violent, they are "necessary". getting an abortion is "violent", but extremely high maternal mortality rates is not violent, even though some estimates say that 80% of those deaths were entirely preventable. we are all at the mercy of capitalism, which is not violent. our anger about this is violent.

iv. my friend gently asks me: "do you want to talk about the website?" but i don't want to talk about the website. i look up and out the window. i am neither surprised nor shocked by it. i feel an uncharacteristic numbness. it is simply too large for me to grasp at this time, a pain that feels communal and also individual, an impenetrable and unpronounceable scream. i still struggle to write it, even now. those four letters are so large to me, and rupture inside of my spine. like ants.

v. i have found, in my life, that it is determined not violent if the victim is in a feminine body. it is not violent if the victim wasn't perfect. if the victim wasn't white, or able-bodied, or neurotypical, or straight, or cis. in general, "sex crime" - rape - just isn't seen as a "real" crime. it isn't violent like how murder is violent. we watch fully grown adults on tv equivocate about how it would be violent if we were under ten, but that 15 isn't really that young. if we weren't a virgin, or if we dressed wrong, or had a drink, or said the wrong thing, or existed: it isn't violent. so the violence is flexible. so some of the fault can be shared back into our flesh, as if the original rending wasn't a deep enough cut.

vi. to survive in this world, one is taught to accept a certain level of violence as rote; as acceptable. one can watch the birds for the cultural impact it represents, although certainly what happened to tippi hedren was violent. this pattern will extend perfectly, forever. we can shop at target if we just feel guilty about breaking the boycott, that isn't violent. there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. and sometimes this teaches a detachment, a casual acceptance that some people are just going to be used as parts of the machine, which is not violent. if a person dies due to an insurance coverage denial - that is not violence. that's just a tragedy.

vii. these tragedies are everywhere, it seems. it is probably true that someone in your classroom has been a victim of sexual assault, isn't it? we rarely consider how often we've met a perpetrator of these events. instead, the survivors seem to spawn in, our mouths bleeding, shaking. we are just a tragedy of the system, a null data point. every person that we stand next to is similarly eradicated from their own experience: it is a tragedy that you couldn't afford life-saving surgery. it is a tragedy that police gunned down another person. it is a tragedy that ice took your neighbor. it is all just an unpreventable, inconceivable tragedy.

viii. talking about it makes my skin crawl, but i think it is probably true that many men just never saw women as human people. i think it's probably true that capitalism and conservativism encouraged this dehumanization. of course it's intersectional; that the more removed from power your identity may be - the less they are encouraged to see you as a person. because if you are dehumanized, violence does not count against you. (i don't know why i'm telling you this. you knew, didn't you? we all knew).

ix. i am in therapy due to my previous partner's domestic violence. recently, when trying to word how that violence has changed me: i find myself speechless. i keep saying: "but what does that word even, like, mean?"

[inkskinned]

driving home from hers feeling stupid and young, the traffic in the tunnel is a mess but i spend the whole time grinning so hard my cheeks hurt from it. call my brother and spend so much time talking about it that he begs for a moment of rest. someone told me once that every set of lovers thinks their love is the special version of it. but really, really: ours is.

how lucky this all is. the spring is putting up little flowers and on the 15th, my dog turns seven. i keep standing in high places and making myself do five-breaths-in, feeling the gratitude sluice up through my fingertips.

i'm supposed to be writing about hope for a local newspaper. i keep thinking about her, and her hair across my pillow, and how when she smiles she curls the right side of her mouth first, a sun-corona smirk.

i want to write about it because i think everyone should get a chance to experience it. i want to write about it because it has no name and is all resonance. it is the magic thing, right, the upsidedown flip. the underside of a seashell. the perfect fit.

but how. how am i supposed to write a poem about it. the poem is breathing in bed next to me. the poem has a wry and dirty sense of humor and a whip fast wit. her skin is so soft is is mesmerizing, i spend hours tracing her tattoos as we share childhood memories. i write it down and i can't quite collect it - every moment a song lyric. every moment protected. it just is what it is, but what it is feels too-large, too-precious.

we lay in bed and she feels so familiar to me it is a vice. we say to each other i think i knew you in another life. we say to each other: i have waited so long to find you. i missed you, where have you been all this time?

her music spools out into my living room. i am supposed to be writing a poem about hope. she laughs at my stupid pun. she brings me tea in a little blue cup.

you know, a year ago i told everyone: i don't believe in love.

[feastofsnakes]

nobody "gets hard" you are doing all that for attention

[serratedpens]

Shannon Pratson, "Still Life with Sky, Coffee, Tulips, Anna Karenina, and God"

[boykeats]

[ID: excerpt from a poem reading,

"Grocery store tulips. Empty coffee cup in the sink. Morning sky smeared pink, like the inside of a salmon.

I have been lonely in so many cities and now I am lonely in absence of the city, the crowd at the Met that made me small and whole as a seed.

How do other people pray?"

/end ID}

[flowrrs4u]

I am good. I am loved.

[alnitaks]

ceramic by yamine & poem by marwan makhoul

[great-gatsby]

every reread kills me a little bit more

[great-gatsby]

reread and enjoy <3

[to-the-hedgerows]

When you work with kids at the age of 19, you get the sense of being old. There's a responsibility that comes with it. How this will impact them, how you can help, what you can teach. They run and tumble and you think, that would take me out. But they're young, and spry, and it reminds you of summers spent outside with the tall grass.

When you work with elderly at the age of 27, you get that sense of time passing. Of course it always passes, always will. It can be fragile too, there's fragility in this line of work everyday. You take in all you can learn, and it's a lot. You realize how young and spry you are, even while getting back aches that never came at 19. All the lessons you don't know yet, the life experiences and habits, (some you’d like to not replicate.) All that was on your shoulders of making sure these youths turn out all right, well that's all gone isn't it? Your subjects are far past you, and they've done fine as it is. 

It makes you look around, though. What this snapshot looks like, from 12 or 72.

The roller rink kids would've thought my own place was cool. Loved that I play dnd, and maybe thought the plays I do are embarrassing. The 70 year olds however love my community plays, enjoy hearing about my board game nights, and find it fascinating that I have several roommates. At 12, I would've just been happy that I have cats and a backyard. 

What would I tell myself. 10 years ago when I was 17 and alive and lonely and confused and watching dead poets society for the first time. What would I tell them. 

You'll work at a roller rink and as a caregiver, but in-between you'll do retail and janitorial and get laid off (the contract didn't go through). You'll try out meds for the first time. In one year, you'll make the best friends you've ever had, and less than 2 years later you'll speak to half of them. You've handled a lot up to this point believe me I know. It's not over yet. There will be more, and worse, and you will find new songs to cry to. I wish I could hold you. In a few years, you'll meet people that do. 

There will be a couple guys who cause you great heartache (and I use guy loosely). All different, all broken up in time. The lover, the asshole, the painter, the second half. You feel the stings each time in a way you've never felt before. Bees and lashes and knives. It doesn't really get easier to say goodbye.

I don't mean to scare you. I like warnings but: I know more than anything you are scared. So I’ll tell you this: you move out in 8 years with friends, and you curate a different environment than you grew up in.

I'll tell you this: in one year you meet the light of your life and in 3 you kiss for the first time. 

I'll tell you this: in 2 years you join group therapy, then move on to single, then drop it (you're at a good spot and insurance is tough) but 3 years after that you call that same therapist to guide you through top surgery. It takes 2 more, but I'm speaking to you with the balcony gone. 

You're struggling with your identity. I know, you switch around your pronouns before you settle on they/them (it was actually the love of your life's idea). 

I'll tell you this: in 4 years when you're a janitor, you'll join community theatre. It's fun, and you meet amazing people during it. You still get nervous opening nights, and that's okay. 

Everything that you're worried or embarrassed about: no one cares. Highschool doesn't stay with you, and embarrassment only happens if you let it. Forget dancing like no one's watching, you could go into a full Shakespeare monologue dressed like Chappelle roan (9 more years) on the sidewalk and no one minds. And if they do, it doesn't matter.

You'll circle back to dr seuss and Robert frost and maya Angelou and Mary Elizabeth frye and national treasure and josh groban and you'll find plenty of new art as well. In a few years time, you won't even remember the last time you self harmed. 

You continue to love with all your heart. And it reflects back, echos and bounces and expands and you still get overwhelmed with it. 

I'll tell you this: in 8 years when you move, you start feeding a stray cat that lives on your porch. And right now (10 years) she is sleeping beside me on the warm couch, purring. 

I know you, and I know that alone would be all you need to know to keep going. If only for one stray cat, the choice is easy.

But you know me, and in honesty or nothing: Mr. Mustache is a grain of sand on a beach, a star in the universe. Infinitely important, irreplaceable, and one of hundreds, thousands, millions. In 10 years you seed native plants, play instruments, make dinners, run d&d, roller skate, act on stage (with lines!), read books to your friends, go camping, love fully, kiss your partner of 8 years, play word searches, get hit with the cat distribution system often.

And you still read inskinned. 

I'll tell you this: my intention is not “hold on for the good hits” or “anything you can spin makes it worth it”. Life is beautiful, and it did get easier. You don't have as many doubts or pains. Yeah shit still sucks every now and again. There's gotta be showers in April. Majors and minors alike though, you aren't in a battle every goddamn day. You don't have to fight, you can breathe, and you love it. There's no proper way for me to explain it, next year or 5 or 10. Not in a way that encapsules every second of what I mean.

Obviously, you, the detective, knows what this means.

You'll just have to live to see it. Cheesy and straight out of a movie I know, (Shawshank, Tombstone), but that's the best part, my friend. We will.

Inspired by @inkskinned of course

[asfdhgsdkjhgb]

something about lonely dogs, idk

gnaw at the heartbeat - wenyi xue / moon song - phoebe bridgers / let dead dogs lie - silas denver melvin / @strawberry-crocodile / nice pup - chloe moriondo / @ashstfu / @valtsv / @inkskinned / it will come back - hozier / @twoheadedfawnn / @/simplyrotten / clean slated state - the altogether / speeches for dr frankenstein - margaret atwood / faulty - leila chatti / belovéd - yves olade / against the kitchen floor - will wood / st bernard - lincoln / imposter syndrome - sidney gish

[paper-wounds]

[louisedolanart]

by Louise Dolan

[fig-fever]

Sappho, fragment 147 trans. Anne Carson

[quietlyrebelling]

god this makes me feel some new type of emotional. i live for wlw positivity

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

<3_<3

B E A U T I F U L

[ceramic-and-steel]

Did you know dolls can bleed? Of course they can. Anyone with a passing interest in the subject can know that. Otherwise what'd be the point in hurting them? They can carry around some wounds for ages, bleeding all the while. Did you know monsters can bleed? Of course they can. If it bleeds you can kill it, and nothing makes a person feel better than killing a monster. Let out all the disgusting little tendencies they pretend they don't have. By any real metric it's killer's heart is blacker than coal, but, Oops! That's not what anyone cares about.

Did you know that love can bleed? Of course it can. Run run rivers red. Everyone bleeds for love, but love itself can bleed, will bleed, has bled. Drowning in it, thirsting of it, water water everywhere runs thin over the sharpness of fang and claw. Arrow of sinner and righteous alike are still arrows. So the bleeding bloody half broke quarter broke all broke beast puts another step in front of another. It's never been given permission to stop.