#inkflowsnetwork

[smallepics]

Spring Lamb, Lau B.

@nosebleedclub Poetry Month Prompts 04.05.25

Dedicated to @aemperatrix

TEXT ID

I think of you

Pastoral

Summersweetened thicket,

Wildflower rose

My home lays low

Cypress bodies, oaken hands

Cyanobacteria ripples the sun. I wonder ’bout your fences

If they’re hewn from the same dark root holding up my spring shore

We’ve got no lambs here. None in the swamp

Cows, nanny goats & gopher tortoise munch slow

Alay in the field a muted and stormy vista.

I wonder if the hills turn purple, slate into gray.

Can you see for miles?

Do aspen spike the same twisted shape? How stubborn

Is your green? When hay comes dust it all?

Late day

On the western shore the sun sinks

Cordgrass burns

Pink and the egret’s white shadow

Must be that color of wool

[humaintain]

💌 from my march[?] newsletter

[alt text: an excerpt of tumblr user humaintain’s substack newsletter, titled “I dont think anyone is unloveable u r spending a lot of time alone in ur room”. It was published on March 10th 2022, and has 3 likes at the time of screen capture. The content reads:

I spent a long time in high school thinking that I would forever be an observer. That I would be allowed merely to glimpse those intense-bright-volatile moments of life — heartbreak/fury/joy to be some of them — but that I would never be involved, be inside, be the subject of those situations. But it wasn’t that. It was that I never allowed myself to be vulnerable when[where it mattered. I ate my heart out in front of a comparatively, punily-sized “audience”, silent enough I thought they were just wisps, and hid the gore from my family and friends. They would never want to see any of this, was my thought. And they would never understand, anyway. Foolish girl. Why didn’t I believe them when they said they would be there for me? I believed in the world’s kindness — an abstract conception — yet their extended hands could never fully grasp mine because I recoiled the last second. Thought it was kind, but fleeting. Then they left before I could push through those layers of excuses and hold their hands back. What was I thinking?

end of alt text.]

[stardustandwar]

ancient bleedings // 12.19.2018

[candiedspit]

[streetsiding]

i'm doing better than i ever have! and maybe i'm not doing well but

last year i wrote a poem about august and teeth, how the pavement

looked better from the roof of my house.

and i almost wrote the rest of this poem but instead i did my laundry and

sat at the table staring out into the sun-drenched backyard, peeled myself an orange.

along the way i guess i learned that i don't have to die to be reborn, learned how to tie a tourniquet.

sometimes a chrysalis is enough.

i think about butterflies instead of graveyards today, and my hands smell like oranges when i hang my favourite shirt out to dry.

who was i last year // charle l.

[bluestthingsonearth]

when i saw you / you looked like nostalgia but a person / someone so entrenched in their time that i im thinking back to when you could actually exist / are you a painting? / are you a snippet of a time gone past / where everything was okay and everything was beautiful / are you someone i was in love with a year ago? / two? / you are everything that ever was and at the same time you’re not gonna change / and i don’t know if that’s a good thing / i don’t know if nostalgia is good for me anymore / maybe there’s some new paintings / maybe there’s someone so aggressively in the present who doesn’t know anything about tomorrow and doesn’t care / tomorrow is important yes / yesterday is what we were / i could tell you that today is a gift and that’s why they call it the present but / I’d be lying / and i used to lie but not anymore / that was left in the past few years / i don’t know what I’m gonna be doing in the next few / I don’t even know what I’m doing now /

but i met a girl who looked like the past and walked past her / but she gave me a present

[criticalcriminal]

I could look into the future but all my insight would do me no good; every gazing pool is dark and cloudy and there is no deciphering an omen from anxiety.

More interested in survival these days, anyways, now that I can’t dream of peacefulness in my life, new fears are popping up like spring daisies in all the space I’ve been clearing for years.

Where has my promised love gone? Bills not yet overdue have began to haunt my dreams, forty years of forced-labor stare me down in the street; complacency dares me to keep up my challenge

while the seriousness of familial threats wait in the parking lot of my local grocery store. I see it now - I can go nowhere where obligation won’t find me; the options are to resist or relinquish the rights of my soul.

Chey Brabo

[etching-bones]

Waking early was a gift, Lin knew, because it was then that she watched Stella in sleep. Perfect as she was, peaceful as she was. It touched Lin so deeply her heart felt bruised