"i weave the universe"

kayli // cambridge

[inkskinned]

we really didn't get violent enough about roe v wade being overturned. but and also - you're one person. you donated money. you went to the protest. you did what you could, which felt like doing basically nothing.

recently some big paper published an op ed (why did you even read it? you knew you'd get upset) about how it's gross that men can't find a partner because women don't want to suffer bad dates - they'd rather go to yoga class. you actually laughed - well, yeah! and it was funny until it wasn't, because something about it made your stomach churn. this is the thing, you want to say, but you don't have the words for what the thing is. just that men being bad at dating is your fault.

the thing is also on instagram. you don't know if it's a setting or algorithm thing, but these days, the most hurtful comments always seem to skim the top. simple reaction is don't read the comments but - you're human, so you're curious. you want to respond to every weird, sanctimonious one with replaying something a million times to find evidence they're lying about their gender is literally sexual harassment you shouldn't be proud of this or maybe get a fucking life you absolute dickhead but you've gotten into enough of these battles as a kid. nothing ever resolves. it just makes you upset.

your father was radicalized. the thing is - you go to therapy about it and yet never find the words for exactly the way that one hurts.

the other day your sister predicted that a commercial that aired during the superbowl was going to cause trouble. you wanted her to be wrong about that. this morning, while scrolling, you saw someone post exactly that - he got so angry i had to leave. it was terrifying. it reminds you, however bleakly: there are entire swathes of people who do not worry about domestic violence. who have no idea why you would put keys into your fist. who do not understand "it's better to be rude than dead." who have never googled am i being gaslit.

the other day you found out there's a bill that would make it so if you have a uterus and are braindead, you could fulfil your cattle purpose and carry a fetus to term. you think about the fact that the leading cause of death for pregnant people is murder. you think about ongoing and informed consent. you think about how, out of fear, if your ex boyfriend had pressured you, you absolutely would have said yes to it. in the comments, you write there is no way that these documents wouldn't be immediately forged. this is going to be misused. and then just delete it, sighing. get up and go to work.

the other day they overturned roe v wade. we weren't nearly violent enough about it. somewhere, a clock is ticking. it's been ticking a long time. you want to say it's time, but it's been time for a while, hasn't it.

[wholenessblooming]

bell hooks: Pema, one of the ideas in your work that really challenges me is abandoning the hope of fruition. That’s really hard for me.

Pema Chödrön: The way I understand it is that we rob ourselves of being in the present by always thinking that the payoff will happen in the future. The only place ever to work is right now. We work with the present situation rather than a hypothetical possibility of what could be. I like any teaching that encourages us to be with ourselves and our situation as it is without looking for alternatives. The source of all wakefulness, the source of all kindness and compassion, the source of all wisdom, is in each second of time. Anything that has us looking ahead is missing the point.

Source: from lionsroar.com (Pema Chödrön & bell hooks on cultivating openness when life falls apart)

[inkskinned]

you deserve a more tender tomorrow.

[inkskinned]

yes, even you. reading this, agreeing without applying, hands in front of your eyes. i'll pass this on, you think, but it doesn't apply to me.

i know because i have spent the last 2 weeks trying to say out loud: "i deserve good things." i only get to "i deserve g-" and then i break out into a cold sweat. who am i to deserve anything? there are people out there suffering. there are people out there who need good things to happen. i don't deserve anything. i am just a person. a filament. if a good thing was supposed to happen to me, i hope it passes over and happens to someone more - deserving.

but just because you can endure the present does not mean it should be something so painful.

you deserve a tender tomorrow for the same reason you deserve water, food, or air. you deserve it for the effort of survival. you are surviving, aren't you? doesn't it take a toll from you, staying here?

goodness and kindness and tenderness should not be a commodity; to be doled out in quantities. you should not feel that life exists as supply-and-demand - your happiness does not come at the cost of someone else. it does not take from some gallon of global happiness. it does not promise that a stranger will have an equally-tragic reaction to tip the scales back into balance.

there is just you, deserving. you didn't have to earn it. there is no calculation of time-enjoyed versus time-spent-suffering.

trust me. you (yes, even you) deserve peace.

[perceivingwords]

[chloeinletters]

For tomorrows newsletter

[carefortheearth]

“We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded. We need to reflect on the way the literature we celebrate supports the idea that women who are sexually frustrated create problems for themselves, while men in the same situation create problems for the world. Though the links are subtle, our celebration of a canon of sad white boy literature affects the way we think, and how much tolerance we offer to men like [Alek] Minassian and [Elliot] Rodger.”

— Erin Spampinato, from this article on the correlation between celebrated literary canon and the ‘incel’ culture that has arisen in online spaces (Jun. 2018)

[virgin-martyr]

Maggie Nelson, excerpt from The Red Parts

[blossomfully]

Sue Zhao

[anthropoetics]

 banana yoshimoto, kitchen

[oumaimas]

The Glass Essay, Anne Carson / Heavy, Mary Oliver

[seaoflove]

a thought that’s haunted me all my life expressed coherently by others:

post from deactivated user / sylvia plath from the bell jar / jean paul sartre from the age of reason

[sjowgren-deactivated20240728]

some of my favorite tiny love stories

[bnmxfld]

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was always just red.”

— Kait Rokowski

[sisyphusshrugged]

“Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.”

— Angie Sijun Lou, “Jessica gives me a chill pill,” published in Muzzle

[eriscomplex]

[elftwink]

[image text: “I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”]

[soracities]

Ilya Kaminsky, “Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky”

[typodescript]

[ID text: I see it as my duty to report this lyricism in the whirls of our griefs. It is a personal responsibility for me: My father was a Jewish child in accupies Odessa who not only suffered, but also learned to dance. He was shaved bald so that Hermans wouldn’t notice his dark hair. The Russian woman who hid him, Natalia, hid him for three years. It is not an easy thing, to keep a restless child inside for three years. Natalia taught him how to tango. And so they danced for the three years of that war, in a room where the curtains were always drawn. Once, he escaped outside to play and the German soldiers saw him, so he ran to the market and hid behind boxes of tomatoes. All my friends tell me there are too many tomatoes in my poems. They say there is too much dancing. Is there enough? I don’t know. end ID]

[bnmxfld]

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

— Jack Kerouac / The Dharma Bums

[195195119511951-deactivated2021]

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”