[apetemoss]

Hey, if you still miss your pet that is okay. I don’t care if it is years later and you still cry because they were not there this morning to greet you in that one of a kind way they did. It isn’t trivial, it isn’t stupid, and you are not weak.

It is okay that you still miss them.

[sunyoungwrites]

I loved a boy, once, who hung his t-shirts out the window in August. Who saved his money for whiskey neats at the corner pub, which meant he sometimes skipped dinner, who liked to write scraps of stories into a leather bound notebook he carried in his coat pocket and the nub of a pencil he refused to part with. He told me about the green caves of Central Park, how the electric lights liked to linger on the rain in Soho, the yellow tulips that almost stole his soul one night while trotting past a bodega in Crown Heights. I loved a boy, once, but he fell asleep inside a striped cocoon that burrowed through a city I didn’t know and couldn’t touch. And then, I shared a bagel sandwich at Isadora’s with a man who made me wonder whether the rafters would hold, whether the grey birds that fluttered above the fray made a home inside my chest; how the redundancy of fire escapes could breathe life into the actually green ovaries of a city I never knew until I knew her with a pair of hazel eyes that broke and healed my heart 1000 times and one.

[sunyoungwrites]

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJamRwnP/

Joanne L. Molinaro (이선영) on TikTok

IB: @perezhilton #showyourtruecolors #tiktokcooks #foodtiktok #mukbang #fyp #fypシ #vegan #breadtok #baking #learnontiktok #storytime #lovest

[sunyoungwrites]

[sunyoungwrites]

You Are / Who I Love.

We traded voice notes on Instagram, like pages from our diaries. “I’m sad,” the hollow notch cloaking your throat / left me a cluster of ranunculus that broke and skittered across the kitchen tile like silenced 쌀. Did you know that our mother’s throats, too, punctured through that coulee centered there, where sparrows rarely land and yet, a ring as rounded wounds open, bare? 

Indented, a thumb carried the brown bird to my window, yesterday, together with a pamphlet for “work at home” insurance policies and a new membership card for the local arboretum where I like to run inside a green cocoon.  When the branches, still, the leaves shuffle, I hear the hollow song your mother sang to you when 

we were both little and afraid of what waited beyond the screen door--

“I’m lonely,” is gorgeous in its long indolence, in the ashes left from yesterday’s rain, still caked along the sly half moon, like an unseen secret, maybe a name we can’t quite re-collect, lost along the way from that screen door and the sparrow’s shudder, slitting  my chest, as Hahlmuhnee counts  chili seeds for summer. The finch’s chants,  a dull thud, where there is no hollow

song. But no 

more strength, either, to hurl four-lettered words at the TV screen. I watch / a policeman turns his back to a man drowning in open air, I watch / a policeman buries an octet of rice grains because “it was a bad day,” and a vector grows between the two, “there is the grey horizon,” I reply, as it stretches around me before I can swallow the ocean. Omma tells me she has tennis elbow. She can no longer julienne the vegetables for 잡채.

I want to cover my mother’s body with my own, in the same way my husband’s shadow looms over mine along the subway tracks, inside the lush ovaries of Central Park, but I can’t seem to find the words to tell him that my mother’s name sounds too much, too much like six grains of buried rice, but maybe you are

who I love / my finger dips / the sparrow’s  feet landed, there, and Omma’s silver song washes over both of us, as we collide, as we shiver.

Seed Text: Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love”

[sunyoungwrites]

Today is a weird sort of day. Perhaps it’s the 2 inches of snow glazing the tree branches outside our windows like a thick frosting. Despite the birds.  The loud loud birds in the morning, which I usually like to hear and almost welcomed, only now they serve as a reminder of what I no longer have. I woke up this morning, did my short little workout with Tony Horton, had two pieces of toast with black decaf coffee, before heading into my “office” (my dining table). It’s only Wednesday, I think to myself. Only Wednesday of this week, and only mid-April, and not even .25 months into the full fiscal year. I need a vacation, I think, as I pad over to the bedroom, first, to grab my airpods. But no, no, no--no vacations, now, must maximize every drop of work I can while it remains available.

Only Day 3 of Quarantine Diet. This is the first “diet” I’ve undertaken since 2014.  All other “diets” were really “just cut out a few lbs for this and that.”  I amassed probably 10 lbs since lockdown went into place--which i took as a lovely excuse to stop running while my ankle healed (still not healed--going to get an MRI tomorrow).  I ordered a scale yesterday, but I assured my husband--”it doesn’t tell you how much you weigh, just how much you’ve lost.”  This--all of this--the MyFitnessPal, the 25 minutes a day doing P90, the meal planning--offers comfort in a weird scary sort of way.

I work from 7-5 most days. Anthony spends the first half of the day on assorted projects--usually making videos for his students or cleaning out one of the 17 closets in our house. This morning, he spent a full hour wiping down the kitchen countertops.  I never understood why the sound of cleaning makes me so anxious, but now I know--it reminds me of my mother. I remember she once threatened to leave us because I didn’t sweep the floor the way she wanted.

I have no meetings this morning, but several in the afternoon. Those light blue blocks on my calendar fill me with a sort of dread, on the one hand, and purpose, on the other.  

There’s a black and white cat sitting in the window sill across the street from me.  She appears, disappears, and reappears throughout each morning I’ve started “officing” here at my dining table and I wonder if she can see me through the latticework of tree branches and snow.  I assume she’s a she because I think a small part of me has to right now.

[sunyoungwrites]

ex-

We were instructed to exfoliate, and so, bluebirds bemoaned the integrity of branches and dirt, as if passion lay plaited together with each keyboarded echo, each bellowed byte, excoriation, too, an expected bedfellow to confirm the margin of gaze. Our wounds, skin-deep, we bare divorced  from desert’s sinew or the slick quiver. Exorcism follows, quick, with no authors willing to bear the cost of disposing paper plates.

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

Love Lessons: The Presence of Orpheus, Alda Merini

[ID: So, within your shaping arms / I pour myself, small and immense, / serene given, restless given, / unending developing motion.]

[observando]

[weltenwellen]

Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus & Other Essays

[lifeinpoetry]

& later, i spot him in the super- market & know he knows i’m watching the way a shepherd tends his flock or the way the ocean shivers when the moon slides onto its back. & there is no significant body of water in the suburbs, nothing to drown in yet we drown anyway. & i take him in the long grass of the park, i taste him in the weeds, knees wet with mud, the night buzzing with the deaths of mosquitoes. the wild silence after, mouths heavy with musk, is complete & even the birds are mute with love in their nests. there is no song except our huffed breaths, the shuffle of grass bending beneath us, tick- ling skin, the whole world an animal gone quiet.

— Omar Sakr, from “Fridays in the Park (or how to make a boy holy),” The Lost Arabs

[jeremylfisher]

October sunrise in the Valley of Fire

[sunyoungwrites]

From our trip to New Hampshire a few years back.

[anxietyproblem]

[sunyoungwrites]

I keep starting new books before I finish the one I was already reading. Last summer, I picked up a copy of Shantaram at Deborah and Howard’s house. They are both bookworms, though Howard likes books about the old west and the frontier, while Deborah prefers historical fiction and novels. There are always dog-earred books piled up on the coffee table, framing the TV in their TV room as if to snuff it out of existence (Howard comes close with his refusal to watch TV with sound), packed into the bookshelves in our guest quarters. They aren’t in any real order--I like to run my thumb along their spines whenever I’m down there. I feel like their lack of order says something about how loved they are. The faded golden spine of Shantaram with its just this shy of garish red title leapt out at me one evening--the evening, in fact, that Bobby mentioned the book to me while getting high on Deborah’s verandah. I picked it up and weighed it, as if I could get a sense of its merit simply by how it heavy it felt. I ended up spending my entire trip with my nose between the pages of Mr. Roberts’ story, lost in the slums of Mumbai--even though we took our sojourn to the Hamptons that summer for the sole purpose of writing my own book.

I nearly finished it, but before I did, I got sidetracked with something. I can’t remember what. And before I knew it, I was knee deep in a long overdue re-read of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series--a sprawling 14-installment fantasy series and what many view to be the predecessor to Game of Thrones. Instead of turning back to Shantaram when I finished WoT, I moved onto Philip Knight’s Shoe Dog, followed by a couple of “fluff” novels--mystery/suspense thrillers I liked to listen to during my long runs. Recently, I started the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Richard Powers, The Overstory.  Two chapters in and then I decided to start reading R.O. Kwon’s Incendiaries, an intimidatingly and wretchedly beautiful novel I started reading right before Shantaram, but never finished.

I hate not finishing things I start. At least I managed to finish writing my book. 

[sunyoungwrites]

And my soul stood there, straight, tall, unflappable, its reflection gazing back at me from the hoar of the frozen pond. From the back of my head, somewhere, a puff of smoke--perhaps from the cigarette I never dared try because Omma’s fury was like a small ferocious fireball inside my chest. My lips were parted, in that irritatingly stupid way, but between them, you could see a sliver of moonlight, as if I’d swallowed a live silverpike in my sleep. Omma once told me she dug up a silverpike in her backyard. It wriggled in her hands as she tried to hold it, like she would a baby. It was snowing, and she dug her bare feet into the soil as a bank of flakes landed on her shoulders. She contemplated the meaning of the moon, the silverpike, and the thick black braid coiled at the nape of her neck like a waiting rope. She carried the shaft of moonlight to her breast, nursed the fish until it grew to be the size of a long wound that drove into her heart, so one day, she could dig it out again and place his living body in the hands of her daughter.

[fravery]

Philippe Charles Jacquet - b.1957 French