#lyd havens

[unfathomable-understanding]

« He wasn’t fine because he was still so fucking angry at everything, and Father still wasn’t here. 

[…] Because he was still so angry with his father. »

The art of burning chapter 30 // @hella1975 (archives of our own)

[ID: screenshot from Avatar : the last airbender « the day of the black sun » episode. Zuko is redirecting lighting towards his father Ozai. End ID]

Avatar : the last airbender // Michael DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko (Nickelodeon, Netflix)

[if you’re raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house.]

Cut // Catherine Lacey (The New Yorker)

[…]

I still identify

as a spiteful bitch. The gold dust settles

on my cheeks, but I don’t. The tables

have turned,

And now my father is afraid of me.

Damn my fury, damn my forgiveness.

[…]

When I was still a girl, I cut my all my hair off

in mourning, Twice. When I was still a girl,

I found my grandmother’s childhood braid

framed in the attic. She sliced it off herself

while angry at her own father. I sleep

with scissors next to my bed, just in case.

I practice a running start. I tell the mirror

what I want to tell my father:

you will never get away from the sound

of the [ ] that hates you.

I only misgender myself when Fleetwood Mac comes on // Lyd Havens

Credit bundle :

The art of burning chapter 30, @hella1975 • Avatar : the last airbender, Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko • Cut, Catherine Lacey • I only mis-gender myself when Fleetwood Mac comes on, Lyd Havens

[bostonpoetryslam]

I had a writing teacher in middle school who really loved poetry, and urged me to keep writing outside of school after he found out I was going through some really dark personal difficulties. I mostly kept my work to myself until I was fifteen, and started competing in poetry slams. At that point in my life, I was lonely and feeling like nobody cared what I had to say. Both writing and performing poetry showed me otherwise.

Lyd Havens, interviewed for Mass Poetry

[kavikshiraj]

Dear me, much like beginnings endings are un-linear. Is finality a spectrum? I deserve every love letter, including this one.

from Lyd Havens

[lifeinpoetry]

Luck is more than green. It's a whole limb, stretched out in awe and teaching itself all the ways to say always.

— Lyd Havens, from “Sonnet for all the flowers not yet in my hands,” published in Homology

[bostonpoetryslam]

Tonight’s feature for the Boston Poetry Slam: Extremely Online Edition is Boise poet and Nostrovia! Press author Lyd Havens! This is from their poem “Elegy Ending in My Grandmother Remembering,” as published in The Shallow Ends

[lifeinpoetry]

Sometimes, it sounds like an ideal fantasy to me. To be loved,

but not missed, or vice versa. To defy every god, including loss.

To make everything you create your name, and nothing else.

— Lyd Havens, from “Notname,” published in Glass

[lifeinpoetry]

I fold myself into dread. I ache like a burning house, waiting for the last beam to collapse, into a newborn silence.

— Lyd Havens, from “”But anxiety’s just all in your head, right?”” I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here

[bostonpoetryslam]

If carnations symbolize gratitude, then let my palms be derived from that softest red. I'll line the edges of my face with a summer's pink, and thank the shears that taught me to let go, and thank the shears that taught me how to grow. I was lucky to be born in a desert, learn how to callous and drought and thorn. Now I am lucky to live elsewhere, with four whole seasons and rivers that have always wifed the water.

Lyd Havens, “Sonnet for all the flowers not yet in my hands,” published in Homology Lit