do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?

🍊🍓 ken :) • they+them • poet header by marcel schellekens • i follow from @ourbeatifullife •

[weltenwellen]

Marketing Life For Those Of Us Left Ada Limón

[serratedpens]

Shannon Pratson, "Still Life with Sky, Coffee, Tulips, Anna Karenina, and God"

[dysphoresque]

Sula, Toni Morrison

[havingapoemwithyou]

Love Letter from the Afterlife by Andrea Gibson

[weltenwellen]

Epilogue: The Big Fake World Ada Limón

[wovi]

*

sandra cisneros

[paper-wounds]

“If I Am Killed For Simply Living” — Althea Davis

[discreetwithabellyring-deactiva]

https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/social-media-is-not-self-expression/

[existentialyearning]

Salma Deera, "Salt"

[havingapoemwithyou]

Superbly Situated by Robert Hershon

[chloeinletters]

Hopecore-ing my way through my terrible retail job. Via IG.

[farmgf]

IT’S SPRINGTIME YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. PASS THE INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP BY ADA LIMÓN

[farmgf]

IT’S THE GREENING OF THE TREES THAT REALLY GETS TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!

[candiedspit]

Insomnia

That summertime was pale. I was young and I choked on diseased zeros, couldn’t cough up the hundreds that made my stomach shrink like asteroids coming within close proximity to earth. I spoke in clouds of ash, went days without proper sentences aside from the night nurse coming in to see if I was still alive. I always was. I read dictionaries from Spain and cut out photographs of pouting models, whales bursting from the waters, birds of paradise. I put out my cigarettes into tea cups. I ate fried chicken and puked. I was living alone in a small home for idiots like me. Who couldn’t stop picking at pink, screaming sores. Who couldn’t eat without reminders. Who couldn’t focus on anything but the way raindrops fall onto glass. The building held magic. All kinds of angels. 

At night, I counted the cracks in the ceiling above me. Imagined each crack was a bolt of fairy light attempting to make contact. I’m here. I’m right here. I watched television most afternoons, flipping through the channels until I found naked women. I watched with intent. I kept the windows open, watching the people on the other side of the glass. How a man walks into a grocery store and back out again. No qualms. I did mathematics on the walls in pencil. This kept me calm, remote and still. The nurses always nagged me about it but I never did care. I found the line of symmetry; the sadness dissipated. I solved for x; I could breathe. The world was a puddle of technicolor rain. I couldn’t make sense. // 

In August, I fell in love with a man who lived a couple of rooms down. He wasn’t any cartoon prince. And he was by no means going to save me. He had lots of curled hair and big hands. His knuckles were always bruised.  And he hardly spoke. But this is what I liked. The graph of silence between us. I liked guessing his thoughts. Are you down? Do you want to go down to the Hudson River and drown? Do you like the way I wear my hair? 

After we fucked on his small, wooden bed, we laid on his carpet and he told me about his favorite colors. His feet pushing onto mine. 

The color red is like a curse, he said. I always avoid red. But the color brown is the slow drizzle of honey right into your mouth. A medicine. 

What about white? I asked. This was my favorite. 

White is rain, he said. How it washes everything out. A new start. 

I always thought of white as a ghost in your house, I said. A spirit you can feel. How white makes you into an outline. I always feel like an outline.

[theinternetarchive]

from 'bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life,' anne lamott, pub. 1994.

[ethelcainlovebot]

- Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

[letterful]

[kitchen-light]

Leila Chatti, published at The Yale Review, December 6, 2023