fray narte 🧚🏻‍♀️

In hell, Persephone lays a yellow gingham picnic blanket in the asphodel meadows and patiently moves to make room for me.

[persephoneshellhounds]

oh mother, i can feel the soil falling over my head ⚘.⋆˚࿔

[persephoneshellhounds]

i eat my grief up like a lonely, starving whore —  full, drunk, and bloated on its bones and spit,  will walking to the edges of the earth help me shed pounds of it?

— fray, written in january 2025, relived it in january 2026

[persephoneshellhounds]

it's getting too old staring at my wounds but i just can't let it die

— fray narte ⋆.𐙚 ̊

[persephoneshellhounds]

how can you love a cruel man, mother? nevermind, i am your child. i loved him all the same.

— fray narte ⋆.𐙚 ̊ || still licking my wounds like an abandoned dog

[persephoneshellhounds]

am i as difficult to love as my father? god knows i loved him in spite of my heart eating itself up

—fray ⋆.𐙚 ̊ || licking my wounds like an abandoned dog

[persephoneshellhounds]

the ghosts of the poems from my girlhood beckon and force themselves out of my throat; i bleed all over my teeth and smile brightly, swallowing it back like the good girl that i am.

– fray narte | my poem "too rotten for a funeral mass and heaven" has been published by Bardics Anonymous, read it full here ⋆˙⟡🪶─ .✦📜⊹₊ ݁.

[persephoneshellhounds]

will water scour my marrows raw and leach out of their nesting pits all of my mother’s rage — my father’s violence until i am no longer their daughter?

– fray narte ₊˚ʚ 🌱 ₊˚✧ ﾟ.

[two-bees-poetry]

this has to be enough

[sweatermuppet]

i am something worse

[janeaste]

Fray, you’re my heroin but this time with an e

Reading your poems feels like snorting a line of cocaine in the middle of the night, and then letting the hit take its course while I lose myself in the haze that is the kaleidoscope of your thoughts.

I get so anxious sometimes that I would look at how your words would casually make the world suddenly sensible, like lighting up a cigarette and then taking this one long drag, and expelling the smoke slowly back into the air — borrowed poison, for someone else to inhale, a calm and welcome imposition.

Except I don’t know anything about drugs or smoking cigarettes but something about the things you've written is akin to recreational rituals that I take part in to lighten the heaviness of this world — without the consequences of a relapse that look like coming out of the grave covered in blood or the words killing you. Didn’t I say I like metaphors?

Is this what a poet’s dreams are made of? There’s something about poetry that strums my heartstrings in all the right places, just one poem a day or whatever, they say. From paper cuts to guitar string scars, one more hit, and my jaw drops to the floor in your honor.

Early this morning, I was thinking about how our favorite poets are not always the ones whose poems make the world go round, nor the kind whose prose has Midas touch, they turn everything into gold, but rather the ones who write about us, or the ones whose every word cuts us bare, unravels, sedates, and then cures.

Words, they can make or break you. But they also heal, in a romantic kind of way — what are these poems for anyway? They could never save the world, but they can save you, in the same way they save the poets writing them, I suppose.

To each villain their vice, to each damned soul their own prose — and your poems are the sole addiction that I can afford. from jane // to fray, Taylor, Arthur, Emily, Max, Bella, M, Atticus <3 // we should venerate people more often. this is for my favorite poets whose diaries and grocery lists I will read if given the chance !!

[persephoneshellhounds]

My Chest, Unearthed

Published in Issue Six: Daughterhood of Astraea Zine

My mother’s white, quiet patience sways, tantalizing before me like a well-lit crystal chandelier in my grandmother’s house. I never take a bite of it, an ever so-careful child, my grandmother used to fondly describe me, a picky eater; I never grew bigger than I used to be — still so small and scrawny, a shivering child left crying in our bahay kubo, awaiting my mother’s return. She comes home and laughs at my innocent anxiety.

It is a promised heirloom, it seems, my mother’s white, quiet patience — well-kept in my late grandmother’s bedroom where my father can never find for his hands to choke and tear like an old 90s letter — I was in her womb and he was in Egypt down with the mummified pharaohs; she sent him poems and I got a tiny glass pyramid, a snow of gold dust I spun it — turned it upside down until it broke, bathing me golden like a tiny sun. I hid in my late aunt’s room, next to my mother’s mute patience, it spills like milk, drenches like tears, blinds like a ray of light.

I can never inherit my mother’s patience but I wear her skin now; twenty years, I have grown bigger, taller and her sorrows and regrets fit me well like a brown, fur coat, a pocket full of resentment, of repressed aching, of fingers numb from writing poems; my mother was a poet, I know this now; my father — an ordinary man, his chest is a hollow chamber in a pyramid far, far away in Giza. Sometimes, I think he’s still there, lying next to pharaohs for all of perpetuity. Sometimes, I think I have inherited his mystery his tendency to perplex the eye, like a pyramid of secrets and secrets, the archaeologists have given up after unearthing empty chambers after empty chambers, Maybe there is nothing here to see but dead, young, unloving bones next to earthworms burrowing on my mother’s poems.

I can never inherit my mother’s patience; sometimes I think she has left her aching somewhere in our bahay kubo, in my dollhouse, perhaps, and I have picked it up like a spiral seashell, like Barbie’s tiny suitcase looking pretty in glitter, swallowed in a single gulp, it’s still here inside me, growing and poking and tearing and disfiguring, I refuse to spit it out. How do I carry it when she herself has not? I scratch my limbs at the injustice.

My mother’s white, quiet patience sits in Lola Glo’s room, like a ghost that never haunts but I wish it did — sometimes, I still wait for damning screams, for broken windows, for love poems burning in hell for its sins, taking me down with them. Sometimes, I still wait for her to leave like a Macedonian queen fleeing Egypt and never coming back.

Then, I would have nothing to carry, nothing to wear, nothing to ache for at starless nights — no poems to open and seal like a stone entrance to a pharaoh’s chamber. My mother’s white, quiet patience is an unlit crystal chandelier, a few feet on top of my head. I laugh and spin like a tornado, like a mad girl, swinging and raising my arms like I was five — I hit and shatter everything in sight then blame it on the fairies. I eat the fine, hand-cut, polished crystals, I bleed poison on my tongue, and my mother is Cleopatra nowhere to be found.

Everything is an accident, even my intentional carelessness, now paper-white and porcelain-clean. Everything is forgiven, even my father’s loud, beer-laced cruelty, even my hands, closed in a fist. My mother’s smile was bright and comforting, but everything is an earthworm feeding on her poems. And every poem is a poem till it rots

beneath a far-off, sun-swept Egypt.

— Fray Narte

[persephoneshellhounds]

girls when they yearn to be soft 🍂

[persephoneshellhounds]

i have settled down to missing you

photo screencapped from: days of heaven (1978) // dir. terrence malick

[persephoneshellhounds]

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

Photo screencapped from: La Petit Soldat (1963) // Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

[becomingvecna]

— David Cronenberg, Consumed

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Fyodor Dostoevsky; Letter to his brother 9th August 1838

[persephoneshellhounds]

"the world is entire, and I am outside of it, [crying]"

— virginia woolf's "the waves" // (1931)

photo from: la petit soldat (1963) // dir. jean-luc godard