this is how we get through this

@hotknifebutter

@blubbed's writing archive blog.

159 posts

hello! this is ZOE / ADRIEN of tumblr blog @blubbed fame (he/any pronouns). this blog is an attempt to keep all my writing organized and in one place. follow my main blog for more art and jokes if you want, but all personal writing will be reblogged here!

misc:

you can read BABY BIRDS in chronological order through this link! short story masterpost link tag directory: #short story #poetry #zine #prose poem #microfiction #zoe's favorites #publication #self-published #chapbook

💿🌈🌅🪰‼️🦎📀🪳👁️🦷🪽🪐✨🔥🍎🎲

artist statements:

#short story #poetry #zine #prose poem #microfiction #zoe's favorites #publication #self-published #chapbook #excerpt

square 3, kind of

#prose poetry #square

somehow found a backup of my notes app from 2021-2022 aka my psychosis era and these ones still kinda tickle me

#poetry #fragments

nostalgia

plain text: i remember the bare and leafless tree blooming whitely in front of the dorm i lived in for four months in twelfth grade. i remember, a little further down, the thin slice of woods that i passed by every day on the way to campus. a comb of trees, a green-and-gray copse, where you could sit in mulch and darkness but still hear the traffic off in near distance. i remember how i thought to myself every day that i should go there and sit and listen and be still. every day i thought about it, i pictured the getting up and the sneaking out and the walking and the walking and the sitting and the staying and the listening and the leaves. and i remember how i never ever ever did any of it, never even stepped foot into that thin triangle of woods before i had to move away, because every single day had an implicit tomorrow attached until the last, and by then it was too late. and now i am in my bed with a flat diet soda and the entire thing—the whole of it—is a long tumble and a short life away

#prose poem #image poem

an exercise in desires. edited apr 4 2026

updated version plain text:

A PERVERT’S GUIDE TO GETTING WHAT YOU TRULY WANT

STEP 1: TRY TO BE HONEST

In dream it goes like this: you’re fully clothed and someone is touching you, but only where you let them, they can only touch the sacrificial parts of you that you left readily available on purpose. They knead at you, forceful and confident, and you can feel their strength, their skin, heels of their palms to the pads of their fingers, sinuous and rhythmic, leaving bruises, deeper and deeper and deeper. And now your arms and legs are mottling, and ohhh you’re a boneless Jell-O jungle cat, you’re developing constellations of gluten within you, you’re a raw unbaked cinnamon roll and melted butter’s slicking up your surfaces. And they don’t have a mouth, or at least they're willing to forget they do, so no one has to kiss anyone to be loved. And there’s no expectation behind any action, so no one has to love anyone to be touched. And soon it’ll be time to punch out the dough, and it’ll feel good, and they’ll flatten it and cut it and roll it and proof it, and it’ll be the best thing you’ve ever felt, you’ll see, any time now, it’ll feel so good.

STEP 2: AGAIN, IN FIRST PERSON THIS TIME

It’s been a while since I did yoga. Back then I was a child and I was light and I was skinny: now all these years later the pretty-faced instructor hands me blocks and the sponge of my knees hurt and my heels won’t touch the mat. The session is an hour and a half long, so to distract myself from inferiority I dream of lizards: someone plants a foot on my trembling thigh and steps, pushes down and down, and my hips go sharp and bloody, and it hurts and I scream but I do it, I’m open, I’m open, I’m slick. I dream of crows: someone waits until I’m perfectly balanced, as high up as I can go, light as a feather, stiff as a board, and at the apex they palm my head like a basketball and try to dribble, and my head misses the mat entirely and oops, they’ve splattered my brains all over the gleaming polished floor. I dream, of course, of downward dog: how far down? Does puppy want a treat? Lastly I dream of bows: someone picks me up by the wrist, lifts me as high as they can before dropping me, hard, and I land right on the creases across my chest and abdomen and there it is! there it is! an abrupt reminder that I have ribs, walls and scaffolding and a nice concrete base. Just what I needed. Here I am strong, here I can take anything they feel like giving me… And by then the time’s up. I rise. The instructor goes Namaste, and when I inhale-exhale I notice nothing hurts, not even a little bit.

INTERLUDE: INSPECT THE PROSPECTIVE CANDIDATES

(You don’t really know a lot of people.) 1 never would’ve done it. 2 would probably be down but it wouldn’t be right. 3 loves you too much. 4’s hands are too soft. 5’s relationship’s too solid. 6 abhors violence. (You don’t really know the right kind of people.) 7 thinks it’s gross. 8 thinks it’s deviant. 9’s against it on principle. 10 doesn’t have the guts. You’re not even speaking to 11 anymore. (You don’t know anyone you’re willing to even think of asking.) 12’s too attached to certain organs—yours and his own. 13’s too attached to your wholeness. 14’s too kind, too good, too sweet, too horny. And lastly 15’s dead to you, full-on dead to you. (Your hands, by themselves, can’t do anything but tremble.)

STEP 3: …REALLY? THAT’S ALL?

To be sure those aren’t the only options. In dream… fine. In dream I open a dating app, let a random couple take me home and when I wake up still hornless I see they’ve already gone, they’ve cut my favorite organ out of my chest, hopefully to eat but probably to sell for pennies on the black market. In dream I lay down on the black tar and my spine aligns itself with the road markings and a pair of LED headlights come roaring too late. In dream I walk outside half-naked and wait for something, anything concrete to happen. In dream I use my words and ask, I post it to the public, and someone sees it, and they go Wow. You’re just what I needed. Can I have your home address? and against all laws of reason I give it, and everything turns out fine, good, even, and maybe later there’ll be a wedding with a very tall styrofoam cake. In perfect dream someone says I love you, you’re just what I needed, but I live in a different country, across oceans and timezones, and I love you and I want and need you but actually we don’t ever have to meet, we don’t ever have to see each other, let’s just each put a palm to the ground and make the whole earth our gross-tasting sandwich filling, that’ll be enough, that’ll be perfect.

But, again, let’s try to be honest: there may be people in the world that lucky, but none of them are you.

STEP 4: OKAY, MAYBE THIS IS HOPELESS ACTUALLY

So you’ve given up. You just want to feel good, you just want to kill time. Now we can leave realism behind and go a little wild with it. Go deep and esoteric, go gross and socially unacceptable, go crazy and plunge your hands into the dirt. Stop dissembling, stop disassembling, live in your ribs in the house you’ve built. Here, I’ll go: in dream you’re choking me to completion in a dark closet and we suffocate in unison, in dream we crack my heart like an egg and I go to my knees at your feet and you feed it to me whipped into a meringue, in dream we’re sitting on the floor sharing wired earphones and I put on an album so goodbad you strangle me with fraying cords. What else? In dream we peel our skins off and jump in the chlorinated pool holding spongy fleshy bloody hands, in dream you projectile-vomit a perfect crystal bezoar directly into my open mouth, in dream we sleep like two unpaired parentheses, not touching, no meaning between us. It’s nice, it feels good, it feels uncomplicated. No mouths, no orifices, no sensory organs at all, I insist, I insist. In dream it works, in dream it keeps working, in dream it never ends. In real life someone exists, probably, and in dream you have the courage to pose to them the question.

CONCLUSION: GOD, FINE, HAVE IT YOUR WAY, JUST CHILL OUT

It’s time to reject dissolution, so go ahead and reclaim your body. Honey, I’m not talking through you, I never was. I’m not talking about you, I’m, like, actually incapable. I’m not talking to you, you don’t even exist. I live in dream and fog and hypotheticals. I’m in love with faceless someones with no nerves, no eyes, no senses, no holes, no way to perceive the gaping holes within me in turn. How can anyone help that? So maybe the actual first step is to reconcile with the human body and accept the limitations of the form. Or maybe it’s time to fall in love with a bowl of harmless and jiggly chocolate pudding. Or maybe it’s useless, maybe you’re right and I’m void and I’m trembling, trembling, dreaming of small fake violences just to get to the heart of me, the dissembling broken heart of me. And maybe no one has to know anyone to love. Maybe no one has to know anyone to be known. And for sure no one has to love anyone to live, but it sure would be nice, wouldn’t it?

#image poem #poetry #haiku

metaphor question mark ?

plain text: you can decide to take a walk that lasts the rest of your life. and you can decide what factor is under your control: the walk, your life, the distance. in my dream last night the local river snaked its way across my city to rest its mouth against my doorstep. step in and it's ankle-deep, and deeper the further you go. in the river's dream it is rushing and rolling, strong blue and sparkles, banks full of dirt and rock and shrub, and concrete is a twinkle in the distance, nothing to be worried about yet. in my dream it rejects concrete entirely and revolts against the limits of the city, fights the metal skeleton and tar skin of the city, fights through car and house for love of me. in the dream i decided to love the river back, and i decided to want it. when i woke up it was back in its proper place, though, and it was the same gray, the same brown, the same dead rotting fish smell caged in by the same gray, the same brown. the summer i was seven, my math teacher's kid drowned in it. i remembered that. that hadn't happened in the dream, or at least i hadn't thought of it. when i woke up i decided to take a walk, and i decided it would last as long as i wanted it to, and i decided to forget all my promises, i decided to once and for all revoke my fealty to the version of him that hadn't existed in a while and would never exist again.

#zoe's notebook #prose poem #image poem

hi guys!

i've been talking about this for a while, and i've finally got it to a place where i feel like i'm ready for the world to receive it. The Book of Guides is a chapbook containing six stories that you might find familiar if you're a follower, but edited and put together in a neat little PDF. you can get a copy for free (or pay-what-you-want, although there's no pressure) through kofi. these stories are ones that i'm very proud of, and the themes they touch on---alienation, obfuscation, aimless yearning, etc---are ones that have always struck chords within me. it's quite a revealing book. i hope you read it, and i hope you can tell me what it's about because after all this writing i'm not that sure either, actually.

A collection of six stories that touch on themes of alienation, obfuscation, and intimacy.

night thoughts

plain text under cut

new short story about shedding bits of yourself and finding other people's shed bits and putting them on. friendship break-ups are hard. free to read here.

one last weird little unpolished thing before i go to sleep

#microfiction #prose poem

Consummation by Zoe Adrien Lapa, from ALOCASIA Issue 17

bit silly but: one of my first “real” non-tumblr non-old-white-guy introductions to poetry was chen chen. i already loved poetry by then, was very annoying about like wordsworth and eliot and shit, but it was a gateway to the world of contemporary poetry, and it was relatable and funny, and i felt like it was opening direct windows into my heart. from there i dove deeper and deeper, and i’ve loved many many more poets, but when i was 17 and first starting to submit my poetry to magazines, i half-jokingly said that one of my goals was to get into a magazine that had also published chen chen before (even better if it was a magazine he was editor of, but i tried my hand at submitting to lickety-split or underblong and never got in). i sent his poems to penpals, read them to my mom, recommended his books to literally anyone who would sit still long enough. it was instrumental for me.

in 2022 chen chen was published in the first issue of ALOCASIA, with his poem “Set The Garden On Fire”. in 2026, I was published in Issue 17, with a prose piece titled “Consummation”. a piece on self-actualization, sacrifice, and solitude that i can stand by, be proud of.

i had long since given it up as a joke—or a lost cause—and for it to have happened… this is the closest i’ve come to crying from an acceptance. rlly grateful and happy. feels like i can close a chapter of my life almost. anyways, you should go read both pieces, and the whole issues, and the entire mag while you’re at it! @alocasiamag <33

am i making sense?

before i go to sleep and wake up officially twenty-one years old, have a little baby with an excerpt from something i'm releasing very soon tattooed on her back :))

Transcript: I’m a fan of the scenic route. The shortest distance between two points is a lie. In between sleeps I meander. I take a pill before I meander. I get close to passing out in the midst of my meandering. The road less traveled by is overgrown, kudzu and black ice spilling out into the lanes. I try to walk straight down the white lines of the spine of the tarblack creature underneath me but inevitably I start drifting left. I am always nauseous. The web, taut and musical silk underneath my feet, is made up of pure concentrated vertigo. The truth meanders also, obfuscated, barely glinting through the dark. Sometimes our routes intersect. But we just keep on going, our respective footsteps even as we glance, and glance away.

#prose poem #excerpts #sculpture

a long one but worth it i think

excerpt of a wip (not that one) that i found kinda cool

clearly an auspicious start to the year

#prose poem #kind of anyway

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