LitStop

I read. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes this, sometimes that. This is some stuff I like. (I write too. You can check that out here: http://shabnamnadiya.com/)    

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An absolute joy to visit with @wiscobutler last night and hear him read from his newest novel ‘Little Faith’! 🥳🍷🎊✨ #nickolasbutler #littlefaith #ecco #prairielightsbookstore #iowawritersworkshop (at Prairie Lights Bookstore) https://www.instagram.com/p/Buu4UVEFRz2/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1j8seg442rlz8

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GRETEL IN DARKNESS BY LOUISE GLUCK

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead are dead. I hear the witch’s cry break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards. Her tongue shrivels into gas … Now, far from women’s arms and memory of women, in our father’s hut we sleep, are never hungry. Why do I not forget? My father bars the door, bars harm from this house, and it is years. No one remembers. Even you, my brother, summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant to leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you. I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln– Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there. Am I alone? Spies hiss in the stillness, Hansel, we are there still and it is real, real, that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Image: Something Happened in the Forest by Sol Halabi

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HOW TO EAT A POEM BY EVE MERRIAM

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon

or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core or stem or rind or pit or seed or skin to throw away.

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MOVEMENT SONG BY AUDRE LORDE

I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck moving away from me beyond anger or failure your face in the evening schools of longing through mornings of wish and ripen we were always saying goodbye in the blood in the bone over coffee before dashing for elevators going in opposite directions without goodbyes. Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof as the maker of legends nor as a trap door to that world where black and white clericals hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh and now there is someone to speak for them moving away from me into tomorrows morning of wish and ripen your goodbye is a promise of lightning in the last angels hand unwelcome and warning the sands have run out against us we were rewarded by journeys away from each other into desire into mornings alone where excuse and endurance mingle conceiving decision. Do not remember me as disaster nor as the keeper of secrets I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars watching you move slowly out of my bed saying we cannot waste time only ourselves.

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From the side he's like the buffalo on the US nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction. That's how he thinks of himself, too: deposed, unjustly. Secretly he would like them to set up a kind of park for him, like a bird sanctuary.

Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world...sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

Adrienne Rich

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Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.

Louise Erdrich, LaRose

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Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.

Louise Erdrich, LaRose

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I discovered, a long time ago, even before I offered him my stories and was pressed into his service, that truth and credibility are two different things most of the time.

The Thing About Thugs, Tabish Khair

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when people say we don’t need pride anymore, they forget that it’s not just a parade and a party. it’s a defiant and visible display of courage and hope from LGBT people, in a world where their lives are still threatened.

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That doesn’t bother us. For everything that happens at our home close to Jedenew is a story, we determine and decide, when we consult about how we’re going to deal from now on with the fact that Father’s story is not his at all, that he only pilfers his story from here and there and devises it as his, that we know nothing about his true story, and so also don’t know how he actually in reality comes to be on the farms close to Jedenew, but we decide that this story that he pilfers from here and there and devises as his is now, for our, his story, just as everything around us is only a story that can just as well be an invention as Father’s. That we preserve and keep for ourselves, or forget, or someday pass on, or can only remember for ourselves, once, twice, more often, and then can forget when we want, or must forget when nothing else is possible. But always remember and must remember again one last time when, as we decide, we have no other choice.

Close to Jedenew, Kevin Venneman (trans. Ross Benjamin)

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WATCH: A Rotating 42-Layer Sculpture of Franz Kafka’s Head by David Cerny [video]

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“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.” ― Franz Kafka

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Oups! :)) made with Tim

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My heart.

My brain.

My guts.

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I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. 'Here is a treasure for you to bury,' Constance used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon; I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

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don’t confuse accents and language barriers with lack of intelligence

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They were rewarded for clearing neighborhoods, these boys in uniforms who were ordered to wander like bands of marauders, and when they were older, if they survived, they had to face the monsters they once were. Mariam imagined the dour court reporter transcribing hours of testimony, and witnesses answering endless questions about one incident in front of a panel of people whose stake in the truth was unknown. Sometimes she thought these efforts at documentation could elevate human consciousness and put an end to all war. Then she remembered how big the world was, how pregnant it was with war at every moment.

The Pathless Sky, Chaitali Sen

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Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I'm okay. Still okay. So why do they keep on shrinking? Not even round anymore. Why? Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening--what am I going to gouge?

Han Kang, The Vegetarian