SAY IT STRAIGHT AND HUMBLE

"Present the luminous detail and do not comment." - Ezra Pound @alisondgreen // alisondgreen.com

[lotoseaters]

Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) dir. Agnès Varda

[luminousdetails]

GIRLHOOD

[durgapolashi]

“Apples,” from 1949, by Ellsworth Kelly.

[nevver]

August is the month of last chances, Nigel Van Wieck

[weltenwellen]

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

[luminousdetails]

Writing to Keep From Googling

I feel crazy and creative, that familiar/itch/I crouch to feed/the fluffy white stray cat that lives behind our cars/think about my ego as my legs go numb/my friend’s young boyfriend’s wide brown eyes/telling me maybe/you just need a little ego death/not unkindly/but also not kindly/does art kill ego/or is it the other way/around/I tape things to the wall and they fall/We nail paintings to the wall and they fall/everything means something/something absolute/I remember where I was when I read that poem at 18/is this good art/can I write if I don’t love myself/I google: mold toxicity/I google: how to strengthen immune system/easy/please/give me something quick and darting/efficient as a little fish/I google: is it ok to watch TV on the couch with your boyfriend/every night/I move closer to the stray cat/every day/leading with my hands outstretched/you can trust me/I have no secrets/I don’t know where this is going/can I write if I don’t hate myself/I saw my ex three weeks ago/for the first time in five years, at a memorial/he pulled swallows of mezcal from a bottle in his trunk/wearing a floral dress/grief like sweat/all over him/the surreal slow-dancing cadence of a dream/slightly deformed/like age had rearranged the furniture/of his face/he spoke with a slur, a new accent, a bulging stomach/I recognized nothing/about him/until he chain-smoked/and blew smoke in my face/suddenly/I remembered everything

[huariqueje]

Off Ramp  -   Linden Frederick , 2016.

American , b. 1953  -

Oil on canvas , 36 x 36 in.

[barcarole]

The Swan, No. 1, Hilma af Klint, 1915.

[luminousdetails]

inside you there are two swans

[cutbuster]

isamu noguchi, glass-and-wood table, 1944

[luminousdetails]

Manifesting a Floor Lamp Poem

Summer sidewalks

smell like rotting

Camembert spritzed with perfume.

The first time I saw a Jacaranda tree I thought

I was hallucinating. A man with stained teeth

offers me a hit of his blunt

at the taco stand. This time

last year I was getting so radicalized it felt

like the earth was spinning off its axis. This time

last year, I moved my bed to a new wall

and it felt like a revelation. Now, a numbness, sharp

edges sanded down again. Feathers too matted to be ruffled.

I drag my heavy limbs to the doctor

for bloodwork, stare at the paint chipping off the wall.

I still remember how I felt

standing on my parents’ balcony

watching Oakland burn across the bay, helicopters

buzzing like mosquitos. Every afternoon, my neighbor

across the street coughs like there is something inside of him

trapped and burning. He survived, I think

in awe. We all did. He spits off his front porch.

Together we watch it shimmer all the way down.

[withoutyourwalls]

Tracey Emin, Birds 2012 London Olympic Print, 2011

[luminousdetails]

Dream Poem

Desire is a building with rickety scaffolding. Desire is that feeling when you grab onto something solid to keep from falling only to feel the entire thing tremor up towards the sky, then down towards the earth with you. Desire is falling flat on your face on concrete. Desire like the earth shifting beneath you, that subterranean feeling that makes you shoot awake late at night, back slick with sweat. You text me at 5AM that you thought about me last week. I go in and out of sleep for the next three hours, mind swampy, dreaming of you on a bridge telling me you love me while your face begins to melt off.

I put my hands over my eyes to block out your noseless face.

My therapist would laugh: do I think I’m protecting myself from love?

Do you remember the first time you dreamt about your phone? Do you remember the first time you dreamt about your mask? Do you remember the first time you dreamt about a baby and looked down and realized it was yours?

[grandrieux]

Un beau soleil intérieur (Claire Denis, 2017)

[luminousdetails]

Orange Poem

After years of silence, a silence I built bone by bone around me, not realizing what I was building was a cage, you start to haunt me.

A tuft of blond hair disappearing down an aisle at the grocery store and suddenly I am crouching in the vegetable section holding my breath like I am underwater, my hand still clutching an onion.

I meet a friend at the reservoir and stop short at the silhouette of a man in all black with a sharp jaw. I turn around, palms immediately sticky.

I tell myself: he is wearing sneakers. You would never wear sneakers. For as long as I knew you, you would wear only dirty brown boots or rubbery orange Crocs that I found hideous. After you,

I dated a man who wore Birkenstocks and socks, and when I would look down and remember his splayed feet the light would go out between my legs. But it was never that way with you.

The orange Crocs, your dumb hungover face chugging orange juice from the carton, puking saffron bile into a metal bowl next to our bed. It didn’t matter. A searchlight striping the blackened ocean. My body circled yours like a seahorse. Did you know they mate for life?

Did you know the males give birth? Father-birth - you would have laughed at that. You pushing out your bloated stomach after dinner. A balloon of skin and bone and air. Breath glittering with tobacco.

The heat I felt for you never cooled. You are still my emergency contact on forms I never bothered to update. It took years to peel you off my life. Did you know anger is only three shades of orange away from lust?

[weltenwellen]

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

[luminousdetails]

the literal blueprint

[luminousdetails]

2019

Last night I say to K: I mean, I know I want a husband and a baby, and they said, you know that doesn’t have to be with a man, right? I tell K my sexuality sometimes feels like I’m ten years old playing with a dollhouse - mommy, daddy, baby. K’s eyes widen. I am surprised, too. K tells me about something called compulsory heterosexuality, which means that most women on a certain end of the Kinsey scale feel obligated to conform to heterosexual relationships because that has been hammered (perhaps pounded) into them since the dollhouse days. I think about my attraction to men - their necks, their delicate ankles, the way they sit wide-legged, the way they smell like musk and sweat and detergent, their big hands cupping my breasts, holding a steering wheel, a cigarette, their fist pounding the table, the way none of them use sunscreen, the way they flex the tendon in their jaw, the tenderness of freckles, eyelashes, scars, the way I feel like I’m falling forever as they fill me and fill me and fill me, the way they fall asleep afterwards, satiated as a milk-drunk infant. The way all we can do is watch them, study them like a natural disaster. The way I am never satisfied, even after ecstasy.

[s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s]

Patricia Highsmith gets real

[luminousdetails]

Did not expect Patricia Highsmith to narrate the hell out of my 30′s but here we are

[acehotel]

Rules by Sister Corita Kent.

[luminousdetails]

IT’S LIGHTER THAN YOU THINK