us thistle tongues

I'm Hannah, 21-year-old law student based in Canterbury, UK. I am inspired by what is made available to me and can only hope that what I create and share inspires others as well. Thanks for visiting!

[sentimentalbot]

— James Baldwin, from, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” originally published in 1974

[maybuds]

Trying to make sense of the kind of freedom and tenderness that can only come from so much loneliness

charlotte ager / sean thomas dougherty / félix vallotton / clarice lispector / beya rebaï / may sarton / maria medem / quint buchholz

[ar-ie-s-ve-nu-s]

Lorenzo Mattotti

[curseworm]

human brain: sometimes we need to do boring things with no gratification or immediate benefit

monkey brain: absolutely not. die

[lemonsharks]

Human brain: ok what if we eat chips while we do the boring thing

monkey brain: I’m suspicious but keep talking

[otterlion]

She’s pretty but not in the way flowers are pretty but more in the way that storms can engulf an island in a matter of minutes. She is pretty the way a dead animal decomposes into the soil to make way for life to grow in its place. She is pretty the way that sometimes you can’t see the moon in the sky but you know it’s somewhere out there still.

[pomegranatepithos]

Church (1)

Is it free will if a body is stuffed into lace with the warning white tights must still be white on the return? Mandatory attendance. Not minding as a child because the Sunday School teacher brought snacks. Adolescence hit hard and I did the passive-aggressive similar to the hokey-pokey wearing whatever turned my mother inside out. 

[deactivated-blog]

[solacebaby]

Japanese photographer Chino Otsuka’s took old photos from her childhood and put pictures of her present self in them, creating lovely double self-portraits.

[atlas--chugged]

oh shit this is so brilliant but also kind of unnerving

[writingaboutmyrapists]

They look so different

[fypoetry]

On your first date, do not hand him your vagina, polished and thirsty. Do not allow him to rub your back or your shoulders. Do not overdrink. When he offers to come home with you, do not think of your ex-lover’s chest. How it peeked from behind the open neck of a pressed J. Crew buttondown. How you still masturbate to this. Over dessert, do not think how smooth this man’s thighs will be. Do not think how lovely their dark will lay against your sheets. Do not ask to touch during sleep, it smells like love and you have a suitcase to unpack. You have laundry and dishes and a dog to walk. You are busy. Stay busy. Don’t muddy your days with honey whiskey. When the boy at the club buys you a beer, yanks you hard from your disappearing waist, remember you owe no one. Even if he is all your favorite music. Keep your tongue inside your mouth. Stop his wandering hand even if it’s the only thing good in New York City tonight. Say no. When your boss suggests you meet Nate from Accounting who is recently divorced, say no. Say bones break. Say love is expensive. Remind him you have a dog and no time. You’re busy. When a friend explains, women have children at 45 these days, girl, you’re good, smile. She is lying. Press her rosewater skin under your nose. Press hard. Pretend it is the skin of a newborn. Steal this moment. She won’t mind. When Friday finally arrives and your friends leave early, let them go. Keep your tab open. The bar has been your longest friend. Churns out warm bodies like a factory. When the bar closes, remember you are busy. It’s time to walk the dog. When you dress for your first date in two years, don’t call it date. Call it friend. Do not let him pay. Share a bottle of your favorite wine, you deserve this. When the wine makes words slippery as butter, tell him everything you shouldn’t. Your diagnoses, how you have no insurance. Count for him all the men you used to escape your husband. The time you almost got a boyfriend arrested on West 4th Street. The tryst with a colleague. Describe the miscarriage at 13. Abortion at 25. The train engineer you fucked in Penn Station, how his son had Leukemia. Tell how you waited six hours at a roof party in Brooklyn one summer just to take the drummer home. How you ran into that drummer weeks later and couldn’t recall his name. Carefully detail your unending appetite for drink/fuck/fight, everything nasty you keep under your skin. Do it precise. Calm. When he runs from this quiet grenade, find the bar. Tell yourself you did it for his sake. Besides, you’re busy. Smoke another cigarette. Take another honey whiskey. Let it curdle your face. You haven’t been beautiful in years.

Lessons in Alone, Jeanann Verlee (via fypoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

I only dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets, of honeybees above you murmuring into a crown.

Mary Szybist, from “Hail,” Incarnadine: Poems (via calines)

[hopemovementau-deactivated20180]

I dream too much, and I don’t write enough, and I’m trying to find God everywhere.

Anis Mojgani (via wethinkwedream)

[haleyincarnate]

1. Make it Halloween night. Turn yourself inside out with loneliness, and plan to go home to an empty bed.

2. Match with a boy on Tinder. The one who calls himself an “optimistic existentialist”. One who peels back the rind of your clementine mind and asks you out to a bar when you’re off work. You will accept.

3. Confession: boy is only here for the night. Your heart will wince, but will quickly regain composure. You will not be afraid to bleed fascination tonight.

4. Together you will joke about knocking the thousand-dollar paintings on the wall from their hooks and having to pay for more than just alcohol. He will ask you what some of your favorite places in Virginia are, and you will trip over your own tongue trying to find a way to describe how this bar, in this moment, with him, is the most content you’ve ever felt in your home state.

5. Bond over smoking American Spirits outside of the bar. Discover he has two younger siblings. Two of his fingers were cut off and stitched back into place when he was three. In the US, his favorite place he’s visited is California. He rock climbs. He’s an Aries. His full name sounds like classical song you’d play on repeat. He’s got a smile that could crumble mountains, and then rebuild them. Eyes like a hurricane you’d be happy to stand in the eye of.

6. Inside at the table again, he will take your hand in his and slip the hair tie from your wrist, saying he’s keeping it. You will grin idiotically and respond with, “good, remember me”.

7. At this point, he will kiss you, and it will feel like renewal. It will feel like the world stopping and spinning too fast all at once, and you will love the thrill of it. You will admire the dizzying way he makes your heart drunkenly stumble around inside your chest. You will be hungover in the morning but at this point, nothing will matter more than his lips.

8. Drink two rounds and split the last between one another.

9. He will lean in close, apologize for being so forward, and then invite you back to his hotel for the night. You will say yes, with barely any hesitation.

10. You will follow this boy on the interstate like a predator chasing prey, but in all actuality, you are the one who is going to get hurt. You always are.

11. When you get to the hotel room, the bed becomes an altar. You sacrifice yourself to him, and he, you. You wonder if the closeness will last even after he boards his flight tomorrow. For now, you are pleading to a god you don’t believe in to let it stay.

12. Boy went to catholic school but there’s nothing holy about him. He whispers “goodnight” in the hollow of your ear and it sounds like a prayer. You will find yourself mouthing “amen” when you eventually fall asleep.

13. When you wake up curled around his body before the sun has risen, you are locked in place; a statue, holding tightly to the last bit of time you have left with him. If the hotel room didn’t feel cold earlier, it does now.

14. You lie there for a time that seems too short. You start to crack under the weight of knowing you might not see him again.

15. He walks you out to your car shirtless in the chilly November morning and you memorize the curves of his shoulders, his chest, his hips. The few freckles that pepper his skin. The way his forehead felt against your soft kiss when you held him to your chest the night prior. You pull him close, rather forcefully; you kiss him again, and again, and again. And then, you watch him walk away into a void of uncertainty.

THE DOCUMENTATION OF HOW TO FALL FOR A BOY YOU SHOULDN’T IN FIFTEEN STEPS // Haley Hendrick

[wildfairy]

I am less a god now that you’ve touched me.

Nkosi Nkululeko, I’ve Got God Watching Under Me, published in Winter Tangerine (via wildfairy)

[huariqueje]

[blackness-by-your-side]

The sign of high quality is the fact the book was banned by the government. Trash literature NEVER EVER had any troubles with the law.

[yetibaba]

From Andrew Lang’s “The Red Book of Animal Stories,” 1899. Illustration by H. J. Ford

[buttonpoetry]

god bless the shape your head leaves in my pillow

Neil Hilborn, from Our Numbered Days

This and much, much more in Our Numbered Days!

(via buttonpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

what is ruin      if not the body becoming

aware of itself?

— Kristin Chang, from “War Song,” published in Two Peach