#lit uploads

[kabbalicgay]

In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013)

[kabbalicgay]

No matter how many times you ring the bell in the bad dark,no one will let you in. You face the fun

house with its mirrors on the outsideso everyone can see. And everyone looks. You are in your underwear

and the room is cold. The doctor's stethoscope pressed to youbecomes suddenly a snake. Your heart hisses in its cage. Your heart sputters,

a doused flame. You are drowning in your blue paper gown, which recedesin the back like an ocean, your skin a bank of hot sand.

The horizon bleeds and the days and youwander lost in a city of scalpels where everything glitters

and pills fade like moons on your tongue. You sidle throughsterile labyrinths and piss in a cup. You wait in a room like a chapel

or the belly of a beast. Either way, you thinksomething will save you, you believe this the whole fearsome time.

Your god comes and he is ordinary and terrible. He conferswith the doctors at your kitchen table and tells you to eat

your clots, round as peas. You want dessert. You want todeceive him, but he, like you, has eyes, and uses them.

You are grounded, in the ground. The pit is a tuband you are washing in your body's black water. You rise

like a fever. You writhe on a bed on a stage, the strings reachingtoward heaven. There is a momentary break for everyone

else: intermission. They chatter in the lobby. You babblesymptoms in a white confessional. You fall from a great height and land

on a gurney. You are at the front of a classroom and you are strippedto your bones. The doctor points to your pelvis. You model

the tumors—in this light they look pretty, like jewels.

— Leila Chatti, “Portrait of the Illness as Nightmare”, from New England Review journal (2017)

[kabbalicgay]

— Euripides, from The Oresteia: Orestes, trans. by Anne Carson

[kabbalicgay]

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

— Danusha Laméris, “Feeding the Worms”, from Bonfire Opera (2020)

[kabbalicgay]

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

— Cameron Awkward-Rich, “Meditations in an Emergency”, from Dispatch (2019)

[kabbalicgay]

Primula vulgaris, danae racemosa, and the Saxifraga rotundifolia. From Taschen’s reprint of Hortus Esystettensis by Basilius Besler, 1613.

[kabbalicgay]

Still, there is this terrible desire to be loved.

Still, there is this horror at being left behind.

— Michael Cunningham, from The Hours (1998)

[kabbalicgay]

Had Moses seen how my friend’s face blushes when he is drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man.

Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain; Jeffrey Gorsky ('Boys: Two Poems' from The Tahkemoni by Yehuda Alharizi, c. 1220)