“Don’t carry your mistakes around with you. Instead, place them under your feet and use them as stepping stones to rise above them.”
— Unknown
DEAR READER
Claire Keane
Cosmic Funnies

Love Begins

pixel skylines

★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

No title available
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
No title available
todays bird
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
trying on a metaphor
noise dept.

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Discoholic 🪩
Keni
we're not kids anymore.

Kaledo Art
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
seen from United States

seen from Germany
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seen from Singapore
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seen from Germany
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seen from Malaysia
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seen from Poland
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
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@ninamewrites
“Don’t carry your mistakes around with you. Instead, place them under your feet and use them as stepping stones to rise above them.”
— Unknown
by shellyscozylife
“I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”
― Jean Rhys
Cozy autumn days🤎
“What’s the worst thing I’ve stolen? Probably little pieces of other people’s lives. Where I’ve either wasted their time or hurt them in some way. That’s the worst thing you can steal, the time of other people. You just can’t get that back.”
— Unknown
“The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand”
- Jesmyn Ward
Excerpt from “Memoirs of a Slut”
I had always thought of myself as strong. Not strong as in physically, of course, but mentally. I come from a long line of fierce Italian women, and thought of that as my shield against the world. I came from a childhood of my great grandmothers taking the slippers off their gnarled feet and beating you with them.
The first time I met Mike was in seventh grade. I took to calling him Michael just because I thought it sounded more sophisticated and he hated it. There was nothing attractive or likeable or even good about him. His stomach distended over the waistband of his pants and his face was, even then, permanently marked with acne scars. I was sure, and thought I didn’t know at the time would eventually happen, a girl would find his humor and ways endearing but to me, it was painful. Everything he said and everything he did made me instantly angry. Perhaps that’s why I did it. Because a challenge to me was like a great burning in my chest, one I couldn’t ignore, and the image of what he could be, what I could make him into, settled in my mind and wouldn’t leave. I was the kind of girl who could see through what he was, and make him something different. So I tried.
It started off slow. I introduced him to literature and art, begging him to have some semblance of culture. I shook my head whenever he pulled out his card games and looked away whenever improper grammar spilled from his crooked teeth. I sucked on my teeth watching him eat with his mouth pressed into the food, shoulders hunched above his ears like a wild dog.
On a school field trip, I ignored him and sat in a tree for hours, watching birds flit past the sky and stayed until the cool air brought goosebumps to my skin. He found me, as I knew he would, and I beckoned him closer into the trees. I was something to show him, and I saw the almost predatory glint in his eyes. Leading him through the grass, I suddenly stopped short and let him catch up with me. On the ground beside my shoes lay a dead bird, maggots rolling their way through its flesh. It’s decomposition had made the life around it, the grass and the dirt grow dry, and flies warmed in a cloud around its wings. It’s neck was broken, its beak spread wide, insects curled besides its tongue. Michael looked at me then, and understood that I wasn’t like the other girls. I was fearless and abrasive and unapologetically myself. He saw that, and at the time, he welcomed it.
The first several times he asked me to be his girlfriend, I refused. When I finally did agree, it wasn’t because he had done anything different or because I had changed my mind. I had made my point that I was unpredictable. He took to following me around, joining the art club and moving his way into my favor.
I was better than him. I didn’t love him but loved my station above him, a thing I could hold over him without ever actually speaking the words. I loved his duty to worship me simply because when people looked at us, they wondered why I was with him. To worship me, as a queen and as a person worth worshipping. I would tell him I loved him and that no, I wasn’t embarrassed of him. But I was. Because I was me and he was painfully and unapologetically himself.
2017
Her painted nails are chipped red,
And the flakes are stuck on her lips
She looks at you with all the fear of the baby bird you rescued when you were 8
That you kept in a shoebox under your bed
And tried to feed but it just wouldn’t eat
And you watched it starve until one day you came home
And your room smelled like death.
Small bones poke beneath large sweaters
Like a bird her feathers
To hide the ribs and the
Rips in her jeans
Are high on her thighs
That promise to bleed
Heavy is her chest that aches with all the things
She cannot say
To you
To the world that wouldn’t want to hear her anyway.
But you beg her to speak
Because the sound of her voice is the only thing that keeps you sane
The girls she sees on television
And in the locker room
Are small and sharp and
All the beauty she sees in her dreams
Of a future she can’t remember wanting.
There is dried blood in her sleeves. And the rips in her jeans.
And she waits in the bathroom stall
For silence
To stifle her sobs.
You walk her home
Besides the railroad tracks
And you imagine a future where she can allow you to see her laugh
And driving in fall with the top down and her hair hitting your cheeks
And her breathe catching in your lungs
When you kiss her
And she imagines not coming home to a house filled with the taste of spit and ash
Of musk thick and dark and the sound of music through the paper walls
In her paper house
In a paper town that cannot withstand
The weight of the world.
by kenplant
Antwerp, Belgium, photos by orion_concept
Dalarna
Issue Four | Silver Rose Magazine
“her” is available here