to set the darkness echoing

j.t. | she/her | 26 | learning to let myself heal

[literaturereads]

"And Cain says, “When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.”

- Nathaniel Orion, "Hevel"

[verrlorenpoet]

THE ORANGE GROVE

[flowrrs4u]

I am good. I am loved.

[paper-wounds]

[loneberry]

Alice Notley

[sunsounds]

[text ID: Poetry outlasts everything. It's a primeval spirit. It's probably the first speech. It comes with speech. It's what children do, when they play with their first words. And it comes from nowhere, and it always goes on. And there's no way to lose it, but people don't know how to find it. People think they don't know how to read it, and that they don't have any need for it. Maybe they don't have any need for it. I don't know. The world has poetry inside it anyway. end ID]

[quotespile]

“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.”

— Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

[feral-ballad]

Silas Denver Melvin, from Grit: Poems; “Twenty”

[Text ID: “you tell your mother im sorry, i love my sadness so immensely, i don’t know who i am without it & what you mean is i have not come home without expecting someone else to be in my spot at the dinner table in so long, im not sure i was ever born to belong in the first place.”]

[pulverulents]

j.t. | 02/09/24 transcription below: 

by tomorrow it will have been a year. is this what grief is? a snapped string of pearls that spilled out of my hands and now I’m turning up pieces in random corners —

the birthday ang pao you gave me that I forgot to deposit. my mother's fake orchids in the living room, crumbling apart. we used to be vegetarian once a month with you. my uncle teaching us mahjong with your tiles because you were too skilled and impatient to teach us yourself. that night was the first time that my mother ever told me stories of your childhood. rolling pastry dough in your kitchen for pineapple tarts. gently moulding your stiff fingers into a heart for the family photo. my garbled mother tongue lost in translation. your six children have always quarrelled at family gatherings. the blooming orchids in your garden that my mother wasn't allowed to touch. did I really know you? oversweet store-bought mooncakes that I refuse to eat. the only words of mine you understood were ho jiak. your soft smile and sweet laughter. I have so many things I want to tell you, so many questions to ask. eating around the mock meat in my cai fan. I didn't cry until the day after the funeral. endless birthday parties for the screaming herd of your great-grandchildren. nobody knows your birthday because you never had a birth certificate. my mother has had those expensive fake orchids for over a decade now. twisting beancurd skin around minced meat with my mother for your approval. were you a good person? the click-clack of mahjong tiles shuffled by inexperienced hands. we celebrated your birthday every year anyway. holding your hand on the way to the wet market. holding my mother as she saw your face one last time. by tomorrow it will have been a year. you were illiterate and uneducated but my mother said you were the strongest woman she ever knew. 

— the void deck night shift (September 2023)

[asoftepiloguemylove]

BUT I WAS LITTLE TOO // ON THE FAILURE OF FATHERS

Michael Wasson This Dusk In A Mouth Full of Prayer // Ocean Vuong Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong // Aftersun (2022) dir. Charlotte Wells // Mitski A Burning Hill // Franz Kafka Letter to His Father // Disco Elysium (2019) cr. ZA/UM // Sharon Olds I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died // Daniel Lavery & Cecillia Corrigan FROM THE MAKERS OF "TWO-MOM ENERGY DRINK," IT'S "LET YOUR FATHER DIE" ENERGY DRINK // pinterest // pinterest // @inkskinned Red Blood, Black Ink // Arcade Fire Windowsill

[aridante]

Jonny Bolduc, Ending

[catilinas]

Chen Chen

[lightning-in-your-teeth]

[/ID: tweets by @/chenchenwrites, saying: “one of my pet peeves is the belief that a poem is just a more complicated way of saying something you could say plainly. no. at its best, every line of a poem is actually the simplest way you could say something—it's just that the something is complicated & strange & alive.

/

a poem inhabits its own clarity, which may be deeply mysterious but that's different from unclear. and at its best, it is an unparaphrasable clarity. it says what cannot otherwise be said—and it is an encounter with the unsayable (sometimes in the same line!)

/

a poem is not ornament. it is oracle. vital opening into wonder.” /end ID]

[llovelymoonn]

van gogh wheatfield under thunderclouds (1890) \\ noor hindi unkept \\ van gogh sower with setting sun

kofi

[soracities]

Hamed Ashour, from "Negligence" (trans. Tayseer Abu Odeh), pub. Peripheries [ID'd]

[dve]

hi. go buy esims for gaza. go preorder a kufiya from hirbawi. buy insulin for palestinian diabetics who need that help. if you live in the states use this to email your reps (this takes maybe 5 seconds to do). check out this massive list of resources where you can educate yourself in a meaningful and actionable way even if you don't have the financial means right now. from the river to the sea palestine will be free. 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

[nosebleedclub]

Your life to this point in book chapters

[pulverulents]

I. latch II. thrive III. bite

IV. crush V. cleave VI. quell

VII. relapse VIII. reify IX. restart

[onlycheffings]

from : Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange and Olive Trees in Palestine by Nasser Abufarha

[six-white-venus]

there’s a scar that extends over my body- long, lithe, endless.

it starts its journey from the back of my neck, right where my hairline ends and branches into two lines; one creeps up my face and cracks my skull in two and one slithers down my collarbone. my head still hurts, sometimes. i shake a bottle with no label and pills fall into my hand: white, pink, grey, blue. i swallow them dry.

the one down my collarbone has tapering ends- a ghostly white weed that has taken root in my chest, one that can never be plucked out. i smooth my hand over it and linger over a particularly nasty bump right where my heart beats. the clumsy stitches holding my wound together left a phantom pain behind. time has healed the wound to a mere scar but the pain, ever the loving old friend, drops by to say hi now and then.

i don’t like bitter things. it doesn’t sit well with the metal on my tongue and yet, that’s all i taste in the delicacies i’m being served by my beloved. maybe it’s yet another thing i’ve started to make up. or maybe, it’s the sight of the bleeding wound of yours that’s poisoning everything that touches my tongue.

the wound, it’s fresh and a horror to look at. you are white as a sheet, shaking, shaking and oh, i remember that. i remember that. i remember the only colour i used to see back then: an endless, cruel, grey.

i can see colours now. food on my tongue tastes like something. but i look at your blood and feel something akin to longing, to hunger. jealousy feels sour at first- like a candy made wrong- and then simmers down to a slow, unbearable bitterness. i assess the sight, committing every fold of the disfigured skin to memory, and ask, “how does it feel?”

“painful.”

the sudden image of my viscera spilling out of my gaping stomach fills my head. i blink and press my palm on my torso. it’s intact. i raise a glass of water to my lips and wash away the bitterness.

sometimes, when i’m laughing and giddy with happiness, it hits me. i am suddenly five and in a crowd full of strangers who are pushing and pulling and happy and feel that awful, disgusting desperation well up in me as i beg, “i wanna go home.” but i am not five and there is no crowd and i am wearing pajamas in my house and you are here and lord, i still want to go home.

“let me tend to it.”

you smile and extend your hurt with trusting eyes. shame tastes like stale mink and yet, i drink the barrel dry.

this scar of mine, it travels down my thighs and winds itself around my ankles, shackling them. i touch the raised skin, contemplative. it feels like seconds and ages ago at the same time, that fateful day i picked my skin apart, pushed my bones back all wrong and stitched it back together. i don’t bleed, not anymore. wrong has become my right and there’s nothing wrong with that.

this body of mine, it has never known what it meant to rest, what it meant to not bleed. i stand in front of the mirror and stare. the scar is long, lithe, endless. i can never finish mapping all the crevices of my body it hides in. home, for so long, was walls painted grey and endless nights and the embrace of my empty bed. it was brittle bones and trembling fingers and the anvil on my chest. and i think that’s what you call home too, now.

after stuffing my organs back in my body and stitching myself up for years filled solely with nights, holding myself together feels more natural than breathing. i see blues and purples and pinks now. my ribs are cracked open and filled with a garden of dandelions. i sleep and i wake up and my smile doesn’t waver. it’s new. it’s terrifying.

maybe, i’ve never known what a home is. today, my bones are strong and my heart is light and i find that it’s okay, it’s wonderful, it’s stellar to be alright. “i wanna go home” i think and with a start realise i can build one now. i think i would paint its walls a hundred different colours. it will be horrible. it will be mine.

“that looks painful,” i say, and mean it, “let me take care of it.”

you do. i wash your wounds with cold water and dry them with care. i press my lips over the patched-up skin and tell you it’ll heal, that it always does. you don’t believe me but that’s okay. i wouldn’t have, either. for now, i’ll cut some apple slices and try not to nick myself. the only way i know how to peel an apple is the way my father did: careful and slow, in an awfully clumsy way that ended up scraping more flesh than peel off the fruit.

we eat apples and you count my scars. they look like lightning, you say, and ask me how the thunder sounded. loud, i say and you hold my face like you could have shielded me from it. you didn’t, but it’s okay. we’re here now.

wounds scar. they heal. we will paint our walls yellow first- yellow like the sun, my garden of dandelions, your smile. in the warmth of our home with our bodies pressed together, the thunder won’t be so loud.

(for @nosebleedclub's january #18 prompt)