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Lowkey wanna see Adrien with both miraculous now, Marinettes' suit was so colddddd
THREE POEMS / Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER This has been a year of last times, most of which were planned, but not all. I have earned my PhD in goodbyes. In the weeks after my mother died, I laid in my twin bed, and watched documentaries about dead mothers, movies about dead mothers, read books about dead mothers, slept. You should be writing about this, I remember constantly thinking like a reflex. NO! I’d spit back at myself. The idea of it. The normalcy of it. Wanting to record any of this. What was the point? The use? Why would I want to remember this time? The shotgun blast that grief exploded through from my everything? But it didn’t matter. I still found myself here, writing. Sometimes it was just my mother is dead my mother is dead my mother is dead again and again, hoping that in writing it down, it would start to make sense. Before, I used writing to remember things. Now I write to just get these thoughts out of my head. So if you wanted a poem, there it is. my mother is dead my mother is dead my mother is dead. She’ll never read it. So honestly, who cares? FIVE MONTHS AFTER My mom was a big reader of nonfiction, I tell her, like me. And like you. She smiles, this mother of a friend, who drove through the fog of Seattle to pick me up at the airport and grab a breakfast with me before my book event that night. And you see, she always used to share with me the books she was reading. She loved things I didn’t love: Hollywood memoirs, family dynasties, biographies of 1940s socialites. But she knew what I loved, and she would tell me about books she thought I should read. The rest of my family aren’t readers, you know? She nods again. And I know it’s weird to ask, but I guess what I’m saying is if you read any books you like, or think I’d like, could you tell me about them? Because I don’t have that anymore, and I miss it? I say it like a question, though I know it is the truth. And she nods, and we both take sips of our coffees, and I don’t remember what the coffee tasted like, if it was good or bad. I can never remember if coffee is good or bad, I only remember that I need it. That it doesn’t feel like breakfast without it. How I pour the cream in every time, and sugar too, if it needs it, and in this way, I can make even the most bitter things palatable. DARK LUCK I know I’m lucky. I tell people it’s a dark luck that I’ve known so many people who have lost their mothers. To have friends who’ve had to watch their mothers suffer, become pain-riddled, not recognize their children’s faces, who weep and sob for things that no longer exist: houses that were sold decades earlier, spouses long dead, dogs turned to sand at the vet. To have friends whose mothers have died suddenly, without a chance to say goodbye, without the ability to process, to wrap your head around the possibility. The phone rings, and the world, as they knew it, is gone. To have friends whose mothers died while they were still on bad terms, a wound whose rawness catches every winter wind. I know people whose mothers died just as they were getting to know one another, whose mothers never got to know the person they were destined to become, to be always haunted by what could have been? Mother, my love, you were a grace that gifted my life. I loved you every second, and told you and told you and told you. You were there when I was born, and I was there when you died, released yourself from a suddenly irreparable body. We spent mother’s day weekend together. I told you my hopes and you celebrated them. You left having given me a path, your approval, and all the parts of you I wear like jewelry every day. I wear your wit, your quick loud laugh, your round irish cheeks. I wear your face and voice. When I hear your voice in my head, you tell me to be bold, to be brilliant, to be the woman you always saw me as. But it’s so hard, Mom, so hard to be anything in this life, in this world that no longer includes you. ⁂ Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is the author of seven collections of poetry and two nonfiction books, most recently the New York Times bestselling Dr Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine. Recent awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the ArtsEDGE Writer-in-Residence position at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Amy Clampitt House Residency. When not on tour, Aptowicz lives and writes in Austin, TX, with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their family.
!~Magical~!
Mythology of the Modern World: Ball Lightning, Missing Socks, Drawer Crud and the Protectors of the Hearth
When I first mentioned that Banter Lattewould be coming back, and the myths along with it, I solicited new myth questions on my Tumblr and my Twitter feeds, respectively. And I got a lot of good questions from both sources, which you’ll be seeing crop up…
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