scottie hughes

Solely writing. I am a walrus without teeth.

[scottiehughes]

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.

E. B. White (via scottiehughes)

[aplaceforlovelynoise]

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[scottiehughes]

Have you ever felt like a song contains a home that doubles as a person?

[scottiehughes]

It is very easy to divide the world into binary groups and then a supplementary group is postulated as a mediator: friendship, affection, sex, celibacy. Raw, cooked, boiled, burnt. Hell, purgatory, paradise. Conscious, unconscious, dreaming.

Samuel R. Delany in this lasciviously good piece.

[doublethinkdesign]

Inspired by Perth by Scottie Hughes. Happy birthday, Hughes! — Feb. 19, 2012 Markers

[scottiehughes]

Go follow her. This is my absolute favourite birthday present.

[scottiehughes]

This poem, a cornerstone of my writing process, turned nine years old yesterday. I’m thinking about it and I feel full of wist. I think I’ll take a bath tonight.

[getinthemusicmood]

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Faded from the Winter // Iron & Wine

[scottiehughes]

Vital listening.

[scottiehughes]

Your life is always just your life regardless of how you use it. I find it difficult to live in the moment. It’s hard to do that because we would rather not. We prefer to live at the furthest reach from ourselves… I sometimes feel disconnected from past selves, and I think that’s something we all go through. But we get over it because we have to. If we don’t get over it, we drown. If we don’t get over it, work becomes impossible.

Joan Didion in a recent interview with Emma Roberts for Belletrist. (via scottiehughes)

[scottiehughes]

5-19:

I will not give you love at three in the morning I will not succumb to the urge for that which I am more starved for than I was before I'd even had it

I will not give you love at three in the morning, I will not surprise myself with the energy I have to burn I will not let you press your mouth to mine and weaken my legs unwillingly, slack to your whim

I will not give you love at three in the morning, just as you will not come into the room when I'm touching myself, and take command of the ministrations of my pleasure I will not give you love at three in the morning where your

jaw presses shut in awareness and your eyes betray themselves against dreams and your cock twitches you awake and you stir slowly into arousal, hold my aching body still because it throws itself against its own walls in determination and longing for you, no I will not give you love

at three in the morning even though that is the only time you'll love me.

[denir0]

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[scottiehughes]

The sound of a burgeoning summer storm.

[scottiehughes]

blood orange:

In my head, it comes in swift and unexpected: you find me unassuming and bring forth a long dormant reaction from me. You are bullish and full-throated enough for us both, and I finally trust you enough to let you speak for me, to let you tell me what I want and make me repeat it back to you. Your volition is a crack of thunder that shakes the walls and worsens the breakage in our bedframe while reinforcing the bedrock of our union, it is a whip of lightning that sings in the glint of your eyes while you are holding my tide-wild legs down.  

If your want is the relief of rain, cool on the desert: let me be the warm gulf wind to spur it into a rolling storm. Let me not sit idly by as you overcome my senses, let me ask this of you before I have to demand it. I miss so much about the way you touch me, I miss the twist of my hair in hand and I miss the plunge of your teeth into my shoulder. Having your hands on me again is like a blood orange: let me climb the tree, pull it from the branches, unfurl you section by section against my open-tongued want. Let me. I won't let you down.

[scottiehughes]

‪Immobility is gasoline for the imagination: in convalescence, the mind craves open spaces, dark alleys, moon landings.

From Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson, a collection of essays that tore me apart.

[scottiehughes]

in a poem:

I have been scrambling to find a respite from the black-lunged polyps of existence, and after much tossing and turning I eventually come back to a meadow I have lain in for long hours: the translucent ambiguity of being in a poem.

In a poem it makes sense that my brain happens back on the first person to teach me love, the first person to have withheld it, and the first person to do both in such blinding succession that I could hardly tell which was happening louder. It makes sense, in a poem, that I claw back to each and every one of them, night after night.

I have been drawing lines in the sand around my bed to protect myself from my own subconscious. This afternoon, on the sidewalk, I saw someone slumped with their face tilted toward a phone, slack-jawed, asleep or elsewhere: the same way I wake up when someone has just asked me a question in a dream.

In a poem I can be as lugubrious as I want. In a poem I can do seventy spins and still demand seven more. In a poem I can be as loud as I want with my I-love-yous and I can stumble against my linguistic iron curtains, I can say indexical when I mean taxonomical; in a poem I can be wrong and happy.

In day-to-day living I harbor formal thoughts under my informal brow. I have done this for years. I have become so inured to the plain English of a city experiencing medical trauma, a borough in duress. I thought I knew how to speak with one’s eyes, per my artistic instruction; in a poem the words I want to get across are better spoken with touch, taste, smell - all verboten, in this climate.

In a poem: a kiss that does not have to be orchestrated, an open field, a promise.

[scottiehughes]

Everyone wants to label their longing, categorize it, build walls around it, stay guarded, until all they can do is imagine escape. Everyone wants to point fingers, call names, invent moral aberrations, paint their misery as virtue. One day they’ll still trash everything that’s working, just to build a whole new life out of an emotional mirage. That way, everyone gets hurt. That way, no one feels honored. It’s unintentional, but that’s what happens when you live in a rigid place for too long. You wake up one morning and you want the sun, moon, and stars. You want so much that you can’t see straight. You sell your whole life up the river for some girl without an imagination. Use your imagination now instead. Start with how we don’t work and move toward how we’ll never work. Build something broken with me, something that will cave in, something that’s already rusted out, something that hardly matters, something divine, something impenetrable, something completely illusory. This confusion will protect you from ruin. This bewilderment will make you a better neighbor. Isn’t that the goal? What is the goal? Remind me. Tell me how high you can build that garden wall without blotting out all of the light.

From the most recent missive in Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Molly newsletter.

[a-thursday-afternoon]

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[scottiehughes]

For instance, you will succeed in depicting a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or wolf rolled along like a ball and so forth. Nature comes alive if you’re not squeamish about comparing natural phenomena to human actions.

Anton Chekhov in a letter to his brother Alexander, dated 1886, from this article.

[scottiehughes]

a poem for march ten years ago

sitting alone at my desk I can crane my chin up and see the sun on the short edges of the neighbors' balconies I can lean over my own perch and see the subway, a solemnly  glinting steel line bisecting the valley between two buildings

if I close my eyes I can see where it made sense to love you, the same sun I would chase on my way home in Maryland, where I learned love and cruelty, where I learned the comfort of poems, of a grey sweater, of watching a beltway sunset.

I watch a pigeon lift up floor to floor to stare down at me, inside; I watch a fungus gnat drift in front of my window. I left this place seven years ago and today my open eyes watch disaster strew itself over my new home. but now

I close my eyes and the sun is in your hair and your irises (ringed with gold like mine) and our mouths are where there are mayflies and mud and a worn towel under a bridge I crossed, years later, waiting for my mother to die.

and over to the left there is a wide patch of grass under an unforgiving tree, onto which I tackled you, to kiss the burt's bees off of you, in front of your house (which I would flip off for years, coasting downhill)

if I close my eyes there is the thought that nothing compares to one's first love except for maybe the hot thrum of a warm sun in early springtime, before the ruinous summer, before the blooms

it will no longer be a return home but rather a visit to run my hand over the mosses of my memories, to hit 50mph on Colesville listening to the radio, to lay down in the grass where I honed my adoration.

[scottiehughes]

Walter’s instructions were to call the hotel for a boat. His cell phone didn’t work up here, as promised, but there was a phone booth by the pier. The hotel promised to send someone within the half hour. Walter hung up and stepped out into cool air. It was getting on toward evening and the world was shifting to monochrome, the water pale and glassy under a darkening sky, shadows accumulating in the forest. He walked out to the end of the pier, luxuriating in the silence. This place was the opposite of Toronto, and wasn’t that what he’d wanted? The opposite of his previous life? Somewhere back in the eastern city, the ballet dancer and the lawyer were at a restaurant, or walking the streets holding hands, or in bed. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Walter waited, listening, and for a while there was only the soft lapping of water against the pier and the occasional cry of a seagull, until in the distance he heard the vibration of an outboard motor.

From The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, which is available for purchase today. I cannot wait to read.

[scottiehughes]

3-12

like the shyest evening primrose longing has a way of showing you what it wants only after it has wound its roots around your legs.

in the beginning: a dual-edged frame, turpitude and fervor on one side, cashmere-soft on the other, impossible to hang

(which was convenient because the frame held only sidelong glances, cloistered sighs, promises to the dead and the dreaming)

today: scanning the thrift store bag that hid our sex toys during your mother's visit, looking for any errant closet insects

I catch glimpses of that frame, still. it was entertaining to encase an unsuspecting victim, the chase of its edge, the sport of their escape.

you strode into the frame willingly unscrewed its bolts, wound the razor wire hanger around your hand and opened your curled fingers inside of me

giving me a taste of my own longing.