Under the Aam Ghash

[pewpaakisings]

i'm always looking for healers

[pewpaakisings]

how to delve

in

there's a heartspace

i seek

a holder

of 

stories

that need to be told

what to feel

what to think

distractions

swirl like 

the dry leaves

fluttering by my window

in the howling wind

maybe that voice i hear

is mine

maybe those whispered words

crept out from behind my lips

[desinbqueerdo-deactivated202403]

new do

been feeling marginalized. like a piece that doesn’t fit in any puzzle. performing femininity to cope, to simplify, so navigating isn’t so difficult. 

trying to find a way to exist, to move past the constant microaggressions. i want to be bigger than them. haven’t figured out how yet. 

but i can carve myself. adorn myself in hard edges. they aren’t sharp, just strong, solid. structurally sound.

[desinbqueerdo-deactivated202403]

Cloudy LA days.

[desinbqueerdo-deactivated202403]

I wish I had a wonderful story to tell about Gloria Anzaldúa. I wish I could say she slept on my fold-out futon in my living room. Or that we once went shoe-shopping together at the Vogue in downtown San Antonio before they went out of business. Or that once, on a hot, sticky Texas afternoon, we stripped to our slips and shared beer and gossip on my back porch under the thwack of ceiling fans and painted our toes. But those stories belong to other friends. I only met Gloria a handful of times in my life, usually with a whole bunch of people hanging around. One we had dinner together alone at the Liberty Bar because I demanded it, but most of the time, our lives were so cluttered we never had the opportunity to meet each other as people, only as “Authors.” And always as writers. By this I mean we knew each other most intimately on the page. I think with writers like Gloria, you hate to impose on their time. I know I didn’t want to be another chupacabra and take away from the quiet and energy she needed to write. It’s that way with my closest friends who write. I don’t want to take away the most valuable they have - the solitude necessary to hear the things inside your heart. So I can’t tell you anything personal about Gloria since I didn’t know her that way. And I don’t have a funny anecdote either. I only know had I lived any closer and been a neighbor, perhaps I would’ve known her even less. Maybe I would have allowed for Gloria to disappear for long lapses of times without giving it second thought. After all, I wouldn’t want to be called una fergona, or worse, una fisgona. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought it strange, Gloria disappearing that week she died, closing herself up and just ducking into herself. That would’ve been perfectly natural for a writer. Both the retreat and the silence, I mean. It’s why she moved away from Texas to California no doubt. It’s why I moved away from Illinois to Texas. So that the relatives and family would allow me the liberty to disappear into myself. To reinvent myself if I had to. As Latinas, we have to. Because writing is like putting your head underwater. It takes a great effort to go under, to push yourself to the sea bottom, a tremendous effort to withstand the pressure and pain and stay down there. The the bobbing to the surface when a lifeline tugs you back. She was a fellow explorer. Someone I knew who was also studying the bottom of the sea. She drew up different flora and fauna, and her scientific efforts yielded discoveries beautiful and brilliant that encouraged me in my own solitary expeditions and made me feel less lonely. Recently there was a rumor going around in Buenos Aires that I had died. It took a while to realize that I had been confused with Gloria Anzaldúa. But I think the rumor of Gloria Anzaldúa’s death is also greatly exaggerated. I knew Gloria through her writing, and for me that writing is as alive and intimate as ever.

Sandra Cisneros, A Note to Gloria from the Bottom of the Sea

Introduction to the Third Edition of Borderlands/La Frontera: A New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa.

(via peeahhh)

[thewitchqueen]

I am not the first person you loved. You are not the first person I looked at with a mouthful of forevers. We have both known loss like the sharp edges of a knife. We have both lived with lips more scar tissue than skin. Our love came unannounced in the middle of the night. Our love came when we’d given up on asking love to come. I think that has to be part of its miracle. This is how we heal. I will kiss you like forgiveness. You will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms will bandage and we will press promises between us like flowers in a book. I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat on your skin. I will write novels to the scar of your nose. I will write a dictionary of all the words I have used trying to describe the way it feels to have finally, finally found you. And I will not be afraid of your scars. I know sometimes it’s still hard to let me see you in all your cracked perfection, but please know: whether it’s the days you burn more brilliant than the sun or the nights you collapse into my lap your body broken into a thousand questions, you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I will love you when you are a still day. I will love you when you are a hurricane.

Clementine (via thewitchqueen)

[hannughunt]

sometimes I get sad but then the world does this and everything’s okay

[desinbqueerdo-deactivated202403]

well moisturized

[pewpaakisings]

blackberries

the smell of blackberries

lingers  

drifting

from my skin

an homage to my childhood

days spent in the backyard

bees buzzing

sun streaming

and juice stained fingers

berry red mouths

giggles clouding the air

curly haired babies

gorging ourselves

on summer's sweetness

[literaryheroine]

[pewpaakisings]

he is not midas you have always been golden

[decolonizegujarat]

The children in my dreams speak in Gujurati turn their trusting faces to the sun say to me care for us nurture us in my dreams I shudder and I run. I am six in a playground of white children Darkie, sing us an Indian song! Eight in a roomful of elders all mock my broken Gujurati English girl! Twelve, I tunnel into books forge an armor of English words. Eighteen, shaved head combat boots - shamed by masis in white saris neon judgments singe my western head. Mother tongue. Matrubhasha tongue of the mother I murder in myself. Through the years I watch Gujurati swell the swaggering egos of men mirror them over and over at twice their natural size. Through the years I watch Gujurati dissolve bones and teeth of women, break them on anvils of duty and service, burn them to skeletal ash. Words that don’t exist in Gujurati: Self-expression. Individual. Lesbian. English rises in my throat rapier flashed at yuppie boys who claim their people “civilized” mine. Thunderbolt hurled at cab drivers yelling Dirty black bastard! Force-field against teenage hoods hissing Fucking Paki bitch! Their tongue - or mine? Have I become the enemy? Listen: my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty rich as saag paneer coastal Kiswahili laced with Arabic, he speaks Gujurati solid ancestral pride. Five languages five different worlds yet English shrinks him down before white men who think their flat cold spiky words make the only reality. Words that don’t exist in English: Najjar Garba Arati. If we cannot name it does it exist? When we lose language does culture die? What happens to a tongue of milk-heavy cows, earthen pots jingling anklets, temple bells, when its children grow up in Silicon Valley to become programmers? Then there’s American: Kin’uh get some service? Dontcha have ice? Not: May I have please? Ben, mane madhath karso? Tafadhali nipe rafiki Donnez-moi, s’il vous plait Puedo tener….. Hello, I said can I get some service?! Like, where’s the line for Ay-mericans in this goddamn airport? Words that atomized two hundred thousand Iraqis: Didja see how we kicked some major ass in the Gulf? Lit up Bagdad like the fourth a’ July! Whupped those sand-niggers into a parking lot! The children in my dreams speak in Gujurati bright as butter succulent cherries sounds I can paint on the air with my breath dance through like a Sufi mystic words I can weep and howl and devour words I can kiss and taste and dream this tongue I take back.

“The children in my dreams speak in Gujurati” by Shailja Patel in her book, Migritude (via decolonizegujarat)

[proofmathisbeautiful]

MAGNETISM

Via: Parachutes and PolicyMic

[fy-perspectives]

Iron filings responding to a magnetic field.

[pewpaakisings]

Reminds me of the Ka'aba.

[pewpaakisings]

magnetism

something satisfying about the word do you see what i do? do you feel it? like maybe you'll always come back to me the sheer pull of us we orbit oblivious to all else

[pewpaakisings]

mice line the edges of my mother's rooms spiders mine we attract what we never wanted

[pewpaakisings]

This means so much and nothing at once

my mother has taken to poisoning the mice that live in her house little dishes of green pebbles sit innocently in the corners under the stove behind the couch i sat in the kitchen late a few nights ago a mouse brown small round sniffing quietly along the edges of the room traversed the room's expanse to me i spent the night making beds out paper towels and shoe boxes trying to get it to eat a little bit of melon a sliver of celery i took it to the garden let it onto the grass but it returned to the shoe box and it's paper towel bed i brought it back inside better to be warm and safe than exposed outside where it had perhaps never ventured the shoebox sat by my bed stirring occasionally that night morning came the stirring had stopped a few hours before dawn

[pewpaakisings]

there's a full moon tonight i can't see it's light from my desk so i watch my reflection in the window my apartment thick with spiders fleeing from the desert air my aloe vera plant thinks it's home i want to lay myself down on my cool crush of sex drenched sheets but there's no rest tonight the full moon and i watch the sky and our reflections