down to the beach

summer / 19 / poet For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

[amoxicillin-tangent-deactivated]

i am given birth to by my mother. i am brought home to a falling-apart trailer. i am fed and i am not fed enough. i am aged into a small being with opinions and some semblance of autonomy; my childhood is a video game and i am given three objectives: sit down, stay quiet, and cease to exist. i am made good at the last part; it is a god-like sort of art, and so i do. silence is suited for me as well as i am suited for silence. 

i am told, gently, by my third-grade teacher to stop writing in passive voice. the noun of the sentence should be the actor, the doer, the taker. i am not a taker. never the actor of my own consciousness, of my own unconsciousness, remember, now, i am ceasing to exist. 

i am uprooted like a wilting plant, no sunlight, chipped terracotta pot, placed, never planted. grow, says the sunlight seeping between the drawn shutters, and i deny its case. i am made a masochist at all of eight-years-old, i am made for withering away. i am made mother, made martyr, made clever, made more, made machine. 

i am placed in a foster home and told the new rules. i will sleep at 2130 and wake at 0600. i will eat blueberries and coconut yogurt and i will make good grades. i will behave. i will sit down, i will stay quiet, and i will cease to exist. 

i am told, gently, by my ninth-grade teacher to stop writing in passive voice. like this, you are the subject of the sentence. i am brought home; i am subjected to my sentence. i am taught, i am created, i am embittered, i am disillusioned, i am ceasing. it is all i know how to do.

blurring letters litter the pages before me. maya angelou, oh pray my wings are gonna fit me well. oh, tell the hell-child to return to her cell. mangled beast, worthless mongrel, ceasing. perfect child, perfect victim, passive. the sentences are diagrammed by my expert hand and i am diagrammed as well, pages in a folder, problem child, trouble-maker, mentally unstable. infinitive, preposition, page-break. 

my eleventh-grade teacher is asked why was it okay for maya angelou to write in passive voice? she responds, because to write in active voice would take the focus from the corpse to the crew. i like that. i understand it. the pages aren’t so blurry anymore. i trace them with my fingertips, letter-by-letter. her bones were found//round thirty years later//when they razed//her building to//put up a parking lot. 

i am no longer still, silent, ceasing. i am no longer wilting, and no longer made, i am maker. 

grow, says the sunlight seeping between the drawn shutters. i am neither the corpse nor the crew. i reach forward with trembling hands,

and i pull the cord, and the light floods through.

[blubbed]

almost nothing !!

[boysaints]

GROUNDHOG DAY, by @boysaints, published in Perhappened Mag

transcript: & this is how it goes, / that slasher-film summer when the heat waves / broke every record, laughing sick to our stomachs & / stealing sips of beer from our cousins’ green-tinted bottles, / when all we did was sit in a stupor on the front porch, watching people / come & go & come & go while sweat soaked / through the straps of my blouse; that summer when / everything was so delicately knife’s-edge balanced that i / couldn’t outrun the fear of making the wrong move, / so i convinced myself it was all hopeless, that there was / no way forward no way back no way through— / it was summer, so we were supposed to be having the time of / our lives, not weeping with our / mouths stuffed full of freezer-burned ice cream, / not mumbling god i don’t know what i want / please don’t make me choose over & over like he could hear us, / & this is how it goes, that syrup-sweet summer when / it took all my brainpower to memorize that / fleeting moment, the sour lemonade & / glare off the yellow streetlights; that summer / when it took every bit of my courage to beg: c’mon, say yes, / let’s take the bus three stops past nowhere just / one last time; say yes because / all of this will be gone tomorrow; say yes because / i’m fifteen & scared of the future & i need you. it was summer, so / anything was possible, but i didn’t care— / i was busy counting our remaining daylight hours, / busy trying to calm my nerves, busy busy busy, / my mind going 90 miles an hour down the freeway with the / windows down & superheated santa ana winds in my face / & this is how it goes, that god-awful summer spent with your sticky hand on my thigh, / repeating it’ll all work out stop moving stay still calm down, but / don’t you see i can’t? don’t you see how this fear has made me feel / like a fly forever trapped in amber? don’t you see how / my palms have blistered under the pressure, how i need you to sit beside me as / life as we know it crumbles & rebuilds itself & crumbles again, how i need you to tell me / that you believe in me, that one of these days i’ll make my peace with change, that / even then, you’ll be here to live & relive the summer of our /discontent again & again & again & again & again &

taglist under the cut; ask to be +/-:

@exitwound @boymagnolia @bakaree @eudaimmonia @exbi @xuanyuu @lovecorerichie @richardsiiken @franzkafkagf @sunrisegf @imaginaryboys @prettyfuckingfine @colourofinfinity @gonzobf @doublelutz @flowerwebs @raavile @boyswifes @seadazes @camifrog @loveislikeawindowinyourheart @ohpombo @spirithold @boyprophet @poetslyre @irwa @venka @brightenthecorners @compilationofletters @myownprivateawakening @chopinns @arthuriankings @literaturegf @pancakeboy @backpckt @weedexchange @burningyear @vnusplanetoflove @transcodes @like-butterflies-and-glitter @scintillatea @amaarjaan @yrsong @claryghost @dyketamine @dykepoetssociety @exbifriend @tieria-erde @ruckenfigurs @bardgender @bicarusgf @feelingofhome @kugisakigf @icarusgf @k4dhal @pinkmoon1972 @raedas @taqrir sorry to whoever i forgot x i am so bad at this!

[inkskinned]

i. there's three stages of wound healing (sometimes considered four, depending on the document). the last is largely invisible; called remodeling.

ii. they tore down my high school.

iii. the final wound healing stage happens below the dermis, after the scab has flaked off. it is a slow process involving repairing muscle and tissue - and often replaces lost viscera with scar tissue.

iv. i can't remember the order of it, but i know it went something like - pink blue purple white. since you braided it for me, i wore the bracelet for two years, long after it had started to disintegrate.

v. remodeling can last up to a year.

vi. i'm getting surgery soon. medically included hole. i can't wear metal during the process, so i have to take off all my jewelry. i told you once, right - i've been wearing this ring every day since i was 22. i'm worried about my cartilage piercing - i've never had to take it out before, i don't know how to put it back in.

vii. it is possible for skin cells to begin to lose their ability to duplicate, thereby losing their ability to heal. this might happen, for example, when a wound has not completed the remodeling stage but a second wound interrupts the healing process. repeated trauma causes a breakdown on the cellular level.

viii. can a body be a church? there is a vaulted difference between life's call before and the echo, resounding - after, after, after. the ringing click of heels on a stone floor. without looking, i know the steps are always leaving.

ix. scar tissue has no blood. it cannot coagulate. injury to scar tissue does not follow the same wound healing cycle as normal tissue.

x. it's okay. the high school had asbestos. the bracelet was something you made in five minutes. my abdomen will be professionally stitched back together. the worship i wasted will leak somewhere else, onto a different sun, a different life. a different poem.

-- "How do you heal?" ... well stefan frankly i don't // r.i.d

[sweatermuppet]

1.15.22 — silas denver melvin (@sweatermuppet)

click for better quality

[Text ID: i don't want you to be a lesson, learned the hard way; pulped up in the metal teeth of my dumb machine heart, hacksawed & hatcheted, left worsened by my wanting. i don't want you to be a lesson. i want you to be my lover. /End ID]

[filmnoirsbian]

Joan Tierney

[unsnarled]

11.23.21

[tenderpoints-deactivated2021120]

january prompts : portraiture

[fairnell]

from crossroads

[spatialll-deactivated20201125]

op. iii — hello, august

[filmnoirsbian]

[seatouch]

you will always have a fire inside your heart ー a.l

[thesireofsorrow]

just posted this on my ig <3 the tender crowd may enjoy :)

[inkedknuckles]

you didn’t want to start & i didn’t know how not to. you always were wiser than me. now you hold your breath and look away when our eyes meet in the mirror. that’s fair. that’s my bad. you were just trying to leave softly, & i should have pretended to still be asleep.

well now comes the hard part. i take my heart and dig deep. feel around for the beginning, the place where i love you strongest, & pull from the root. put back the dirt that comes with it. that’s good earth.

[bulletgirl]

wave #2 diaries  ‘’  epiphany.  w. 

[ivyburied]

trying to say hello to the nosebleed summer like it doesn’t hurt, like i am not filled to the brim with sun, too much of it to catch in my hands. sleeping sickness salts me with its unthinkably rusted embrace. i want so badly that i am willing to beg: raspberry hearts, slate-colored monsoon, the choking green that happened overnight. again and again, i walk down the steps to the stained-moss water. each morning, we tidy the kitchen light and skin the chalk off the sidewalk and find new ways to run out of hours. 

[aikaleegrave]

unbury || transcription below

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