[555]

born in 1999, there is agony in having felt so little and then so much

[pharronida]

i liked these posts in 2021 while suffering of a terrible heartbreak, of an idealised love that never even really happened of one of the loves i was actually aching to have and i come back to this blog 4 years later having met truly the person who healed me the person our dog will excitedly sit at the door for 5 minutes to welcome because she can hear the car's engine from afar the person i'm building a family with the person i'm waiting to come home so we can watch the new season of 'love is blind' and talk about our day

it's true that the gift of patience is love that focusing on yourself will lead you to greatness for it led me to her and with her i'm even greater she is the person who never wanted to leave, the one who never got scared, she was the one bold enough to believe in me

bottom line is 4 years later i'm logging in here terribly amused by how dramatic that rejection felt compared to where i am now

[firstfullmoon]

I once cried for three

days about a purple butterfly kite that refused to fly. Weeks later, I sobbed at our toaster for burning my optimism,

and when you called me unstable, I kicked our floor pantry just to prove you right. It was inevitable. You would spit me

out as if I was a watermelon seed. You would ask me three times a day how I felt about broken backspaces, but my eyes

were already decomposing. Days expired. I was the rotting Jack O’ Lantern left outside our door. Every time you told me a

truth, I used a magnifying glass to find all of your potholed lies. Eventually, I fell silent watching the image of you,

dad, melt like the icicles that later formed on our house gutters. I tried to hold them once, but they only burned my hands.

— Noor Hindi, from “Walking Around With A Broken Umbrella”

[magdaliny-deactivated20191030]

“In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies.”

— Nicholas Rombes, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (via bobschofield)

[rotmance-deactivated20210324]

Home, a transitive

by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, a Tibetan poet. On a personal level, this is one of the most stunning poems I’ve read in a long time.

1

The persimmon tree and my neighbor’s son — fronted by acne — winter’s diet. Meanwhile, caves and rocks are named in the future tense. Stupefied gargoyles have had better luck in history books; the nation’s monuments are made of enduring stuff. We are obstinate ink stain, memory, an animal whose similes lose scale. If story is a wavelength, we could pick a beginning, follow intention to the border, then let custom reign. When we build a nation, we are permanently old and always new. Mother died a refugee, she thought the status was a promise of return. She had a version of nation under the bed. Never mind that her village took a new name; the jar of water from her childhood’s river, ten stones and five twigs were clues that home was transitive.

2

The invasion on body holds only the heart hostage. Armies of the past unfurl the flag of love at dawn, there are no takers but the part of self that privileges misery. Soon, you will fall. As the fruits swell, the branches sag with orange sweetness. I miss you, orange much. I want time to return to the moment before you got off the bus and walked toward the beginning of the story (this is a we tragedies are made of). If you’d been ten minutes late, if geography was inconsequential to the struggle of belonging, there would be no reason to allude to the mood of patriarchy. Bring a different set of ears, or measuring system, something that communicates the loss that all the words along the border are fiction. Bring a heart that barters; that is not afraid to split.

3

Heart muscles begin their dirge during a heart attack. Oxidation is linked to regeneration, which is also to say words build their own web within a system. She said, All disease starts in the colon. She knows where oxygen is stored in the building. She knows who needs it most, sometimes it is given to the one who will heal quickest. In time, new tissue granulates the wound: pattern of tiny cells visible on the sun’s surface through a telescope, or cumulus clouds, or dandelion clocks. The edges of a wound shrink over time around a scar, that, like maps, tell an incomplete story.

4

Drizzle morning, a color-shy palette against which trees, brought to the forefront, are not themselves. Elsewhere, the heater rumbles, abiding to mechanical intuition, turning on and off. I stay cold, I am warm. I know nothing about conduction or the secret of a lie. The street, wearied by leaves pressing as far as stone allows for sinking, is mottled from impositions. A crow hovers over a chimney, buoyed by who knows what. Intimations of life push upward in hot air. An ordinary day on an ordinary street, where the only proof of people are lights on the porch, timid in the brume, and images of refugees on television screens.

5

A sadness is thickening the stomach’s heart, it must, it cannot collapse into self-ashes. Fresh flowers for gods at a discount; today no discount for happiness. Today, the sun hisses, eyes date us. Split in two, asphalt day. The heart can return to its normal size in four months. Things in space are produced out of discord. The time it takes to turn to time. We were sitting in a room fused of desire, not for the other but for the one from the past whose lashings we scratch in our dreams, as salve. This side of the river, after the pass, we learn about boundaries when we shut the front door. Fields of bodies on the verge of drinking from the river. Lips opened to freeze: that is one memory of the old country forgotton by books in school. Mothers remember the bodies they buried. Life after death, and death in every breath. Belonging: a verb and a strip of hope I fed with orchids on sale and recipes brought from a country I now hover over in virtual maps. I twist time as a child tightens the cap of a bottle, the right direction a consequence of loss, the left the vocabulary of departure. I am walking backwards hoping to reverse, to unsee what I cannot forget. To leave something else as trails to find a way forward.

[loveletter2you]

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

bell hooks, All About Love (via loveletter2you)

[megairea]

you are the queen of anarchy, of madness, of belonging to no one Stay that way

Nizar Qabbani, from I Have No Power (via megairea)

[astroportals]

“(…) a body less and less yours— a body, God knows, is not what makes you anyway.”

— Look: Poems, ‘Personal Effects’ by Solmaz Sharif (via decreation)

[kafk-a]

Mary Ruefle, ‘The Tenor of Your Yes’

[brella]

good essays i’ve read this year

“the siren song” by nina maclaughlin

“out there: on not finishing” by devin kelly

“illuminating kirinyaga: meaing and knowing in mount kenya’s forests” by tristan mcconnell

“on the igbo art of storytelling” by ikechukwu ogbu

“poetry fills tehran streets as iranians adapt nowruz rituals to corona restrictions” by alex shams

“writing emails to my late father” by krista stevens

“panic is worse than pain: how fiction failed me after trauma” by jenn ashworth

[headlightsforever]

“You have the blood of a poet. You have that and always will. You show, in the middle of savage things (that I like), the gentleness of your heart, that is so full of pain and light.”

— Federico García Lorca

[heavensickness]

[ON LOSING LOVE]: This is the model I propose. You are arriving home and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart shaped.

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters

[primulaceas]

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

[hedgehog-moss]

Some warm poetry, for cold evenings:

Molly Fisk, “Winter Sun” (We can make do with so little / just the hint of warmth, the slanted light.)

Pat Schneider, “The Patience of Ordinary Things” (It is a kind of love, is it not? / how the cup holds the tea.)

Barbara Ras, “Bite Every Sorrow” (You can speak a foreign language, sometimes / and it can mean something.)

Jack Gilbert, “Failing and Flying” (Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.)

Lisel Mueller, “Things” (Even what was beyond us / was recast in our image; / we gave the country a heart, / the storm an eye)

Rabindranath Tagore, “On the Seashore” (The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach / On the seashore of endless worlds children meet)

John O’Donohue, “Matins” (May I live this day / Compassionate of heart / Gentle in word / Courageous in thought)

Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm” (The summer night is like a perfection of thought. / The house was quiet because it had to be)

Brian Patten, “Inessential Things” (Cats remember what is essential of days)

Emily Dickinson, “Simplicity” (How happy is the little stone / that rambles in the road, alone)

Yi Lu, “Valley’s Green” (flowers like tiny saucers — little bowls — little cups / filled to the brim with their own colors)

Jacques Prévert, “How to Paint a Bird’s Portrait” (When the bird comes / if it comes / observe the most profound silence)

Archibald MacLeish, “Eleven” (Happy as though he had no name, as though
 / He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem,
 / Like a root growing…)

Denise Levertov, “A Woman Alone” (Then / self-pity dries up, a joy / untainted by guilt lifts her. / She has fears, but not about loneliness)

Richard Brautigan, “Your Catfish Friend” (I’d love you and be your catfish / friend and drive such lonely / thoughts from your mind)

Linda Gregg, “The Letter” (I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking
 / good care of myself)

Andrew Lang, “Ballade of True Wisdom” (And I’d leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray, / For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers)

Ada Limón, “The Raincoat” (my whole life I’ve been under her / raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel / that I never got wet.)

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Just” (These people, unaware, are saving the world)

Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” (I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.)

[jazbaaati]

- Jeanette Winterson on The Waves by Virginia Woolf. (A Veil of Words from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery)

[thingsworthsaving]

I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience—bring words close to the body—as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.

Lidia Yuknavitch, from The Chronology of Water (via thingsworthsaving)

[finita--la--commedia]

Today I tried hard to think a little less of you—that is not less of you—but not let my mind dwell too much on the thought of you—Do you know why ?—Silly isn’t it—There are a thousand & one things I’d like to ask you were you here—& still I know I wouldn’t let you answer any—I really don’t know whether I want to ask anything of consequence—or anything of inconsequence—I guess I just mean I’d like to have you near me …

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), in a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)   [New York City] • [March 31, 1918] in: ”My Faraway One. Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Volume 1, 1915–1933 (via finita--la--commedia)

[luthienne]

Rita Dove, “The Venus of Willendorf”