Poetry and Writing by Tarana Reddy

Wield words like they have worth.

[cherryirises-deactivated2020042]

@ all of my followers who use the mobile tumblr app!!!

please go to “General Settings” then to “Dashboard Preferences” and turn off “Best Stuff First”. This is killing artist exposure! Please, please, PLEASE, turn it off if you really do love the artists you follow! You’d be helping us so much! Please reblog this so that more people may know!

[taranareddy]

I say “no” And his lips lift Less smile Just teeth As if to say Don’t blame me for the way you carry your body Like it is both precious and worthless As if to say Anybody’s going to want that mouth, girl The way you’re holding it softly open As if to say You with that laugh you throw my way Like you meant to With the wine on your tongue And your hand on my arm Don’t tell me you didn’t want this As if to say Who told you, girl, That you get a say?

Tarana Reddy, NO (via taranareddy)

[taranareddy]

“so what do you do when you hold your lazy up to the light and it starts to look a lot like paralysis?”

- Tarana Reddy

[taranareddy]

I’ve grown unused to the mouthfeel of it, the burning, the throat-closing and refusing to come unstuck, the dry tongue probing a dusty upper palate. Rain insects used to crowd at the yellow tubelight in this room, but they have gone. There is no wetness here. The air sucks at my skin, turning me into hay awaiting a matchstick. Scarecrow. Scarewoman. You should have known better than to come home to a desert.

Tarana Reddy, Family

[tiffanyillustrating]

olivia gatwood tweeted this awhile back & i was/still am obsessed with it so i made it into a comic w/ her blessing. 

[buttonpoetry]

Check out Olivia’s brilliant book here.

[taranareddy]

I say “no” And his lips lift Less smile Just teeth As if to say Don’t blame me for the way you carry your body Like it is both precious and worthless As if to say Anybody’s going to want that mouth, girl The way you’re holding it softly open As if to say You with that laugh you throw my way Like you meant to With the wine on your tongue And your hand on my arm Don’t tell me you didn’t want this As if to say Who told you, girl, That you get a say?

Tarana Reddy, NO

[poetryriot]

Each, each,each other

They put In blue contacts. Silicone Assets. And plastic smiles.

It is copy and Paste Copy and paste. Your are a syntax error. And maybe that is Why you pollute my Thoughts.

Maybe I enjoy The thought of Smoking in back alley Streets, evening Friday. Waking up Lungs full of nicotine Saying fuck uni And falling back to sleep. Smashing the phone On to be pillow.

Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t.

You are chaos In it’s most blasted Form. Your edges are rough And your bottom tooth Crooked. You have freckle beside Your upper lip. You in all your savage Glory are untouched By needles and Too many pretentious Smiles.

Maybe I like the fact That you, prefer pizzas Over gourmet. Under cover adventures At 10 past 2 AM Over morning Wood. Maybe you in Your entirety Are right for me In your whisky Hidden in a mountain Dew Bottle. And smokers cough.

You are not right for me Maybe I suit plastic Better. You are not clean cut. You are torn parchment Buried in a ten Year time capsule. Maybe I’m not right For you I talk to much Stutter when I ask for My ticket. Walked 3 miles. Cause I was too afraid To catch the fucking bus.

I am too quiet and Impatient. You are too loud and patient. We are opposite ends of The spectrum.

Maybe I hate You maybe I want you to Roll your R’s In between my Legs.

We are awful For each other. And we know this. But I love the brown Your eyes they are my Melted horizons. And you love the Way my lips feel on your Eyes after nights of old Friends and strained phone Calls with your father.

[taranareddy]

I think about an alternate reality in which you and I never met. Imagine, I tell myself, a world in which you have none of these memories. Imagine this city wiped clean of all these sensations, the we-kissed-in-this-corridor, the we-drove-down-these-roads. Imagine being free. And so I imagine. It is a quieter place, that alternate reality. My heart doesn't wake me up with its laboured beating. I don't spend hours almost-booking flight tickets. I imagine that you exist far from me. I do not almost keel over in pain every time I smell Davidoff on someone else. I smoke a different brand of cigarettes. You are driving someone else around a city that is not mine, not ours, and I never knew what that felt like, so it doesn't hurt that it isn't my hand under yours on the stick-shift. It doesn't take long for me to remember. That this is a world in which you didn't make me stand in the middle of a darkened hotel room and kiss every inch of me. You didn't talk me into throwing out the suicide note I'd had for months in my underwear here. You didn't break my heart in this world, but you didn't save me either.

Tarana Reddy, Alternate Reality

[taranareddy]

When I watch the numbers in my phone Go from 00.00 to 00.01 My fingers always flex You are always one text away And this minute of mine This today-becoming-yesterday Was yours for years This first minute of tomorrow Was you and me echoing In the undefined space Between your phone and mine You and me turning our pasts into stories Wrapped up in the getting-to-know-you Unravelling our pain like gauze from wounds Spinning soft, quiet understanding I remember feeling so secure Carried from one day through to the next On the rhythm of your deepening sleep-voice It is 00.01 a.m. again And you would say, “Well, good morning.” And all I want is to remind you of how that sounded To describe again how it made my chest tighten Knowing that we had begun another day together Knowing that it would end the same way

Tarana Reddy, “Well, good morning.”

[taranareddy]

sheesh. I love your writing 💕

Thank you <3

[taranareddy]

and all I ask / is for these feet to stop walking / down roads to old pain / is for this heart to quit undoing / its own scar tissue / bleeding once is enough / is for these hands / to let go / let go / let go

Tarana Reddy, All My Dreams Are Of Memories

[taranareddy]

Love like a hot water bottle Love that soothed Spread Healed Love like biting on a hangnail Love that stung Promised blood Love like an earthquake Like volcanoes Like tsunamis Love that destroys That began Always begin With faultlines

Tarana Reddy, Faultlines

[taranareddy]

The last last day begins almost three years after the first. 

It begins with me angry-crying in the Arbor bathroom, clutching my phone to my chest, holding on to the wall of the cubicle. 

I look at the time on my phone and gave myself 3 minutes to fall apart. I’ll be back outside by 11.55.

I emerge, stare at myself in the mirror, ascertain that I look as pretty as is possible, given the circumstances, and go back out to pretend like I’m not being repeatedly ripped asunder by lightning strikes of pain.

Why did it begin this way?

Because my ex-boyfriend, ex of only 13 hours, has just texted me casually about breakup sex, like he’s over it, like he doesn’t give a fuck. 

And I’m suddenly back to the first last day. 

I became familiar with the way heartbreak hurts three years ago.

When I was in love with the same boy, and he was in love with someone else (or so he told me, after every time we hooked up). I was back to feeling stupid and small for loving this person who couldn’t give more than half a damn about me.

I realize that I’m living in cycles. My life follows the same patterns. I’m trapped in a Moebius strip of idiotic sexual and romantic decisions. 

I became familiar with the way heartbreak hurts three years ago.

I can see myself mourning the loss of him the same way I did in 2014--shaking nightmares, waking up with tears already on my face (is there anything more pathetic and dramatic than crying in your sleep), stealing away to the office bathroom to fall apart for 3 minutes, sad music to make myself sadder, desperate battles to not pick up every sharp edge in my vicinity.

I became familiar with the way heartbreak hurts three years ago.

Wanting to call him after he has wrapped himself away from me in a soft blanket of indifference. Wanting to rip my self esteem out of my own chest and offer it to him. Wanting to scream-cry: “Okay, OKAY so you don’t need to fall asleep to the sound of my voice anymore. Maybe that means this was meant to end. Maybe we drowned it in too many cliches, with the cigarette smoke conversations and midnight drives and stargazing. Maybe it means we sank this thing with the weight of our expectations. But you could, like, give a fuck, you know? You COULD.”

I became familiar with the way heartbreak hurts three years ago.

And of course, of course, here it is again, this grey, throbbing, dripping ache.

The last last day ends with him leaving my bed at 4 a.m. He’s a silhouette against my moonlit window and I am half asleep. He leans over me and kisses me. I am paralysed by the depth of the nested goodbye. 

He will leave, and leave, and leave.

There was no breakup sex. There were only breakup tears threatening at the edges of eyelids, blinked away. Only breakup smiles, rueful, dishonest. 

He has left, and left, and left.

And I am here, crying on the end of my cigarette. 

I became familiar with the way heartbreak hurts three years ago.

And, of course, here it is again.

[not-like-the-restaurant]

Friend: “Hey, I haven’t seen you in forever! how are you?”

me: “Fine, thanks.”

Lemony Snicket from outta nowhere: “Of course, in this case, ‘fine’ is only meant to reassure. She has never been less fine, nor was she ever fine in the first place. Here, the word ‘fine’ could be defined as ‘I am actually slowly dying on the inside, but don’t wish for anyone to worry’.

[tristamateer]

[taranareddy]

I sucked on the bones of us Long after the meal was over Nibbled on the ends Chewed right down to the marrow I forget how you taste Until my tongue finds another shard of you between my teeth

Tarana Reddy, Leftovers

[latenightcornerstore]

First, quit picking old wounds and going for walks in the aches and pains you already made it through– you call it healing, but it sounds like a good way to take a haunting home with you. LONELY is a no-vacancies sign for an empty room on the backside of your chest, and there will never be enough people to love that empty out of you. Love will not save you. You will save you.   Remember, no matter how much you need a voice at the other end of the line who only wants to take care of you, it is a felony to call 911 just because you need someone to talk to. You cannot shrink to radio static, to heavy breath on a telephone. Your aching does not end in an ambulance.   Now, breathe. Yes, I know you’ve heard this one before. Do it anyway. Got ribs like the wrong side of a fistfight, yeah? That’s from the hyperventilating. Your lungs just survived a car crash inside of your body. Be gentle with them, please.   Find the pocket of your heartbeat where you keep forgiveness. We will try again tomorrow– I know you’ve got a bone to pick with tomorrow, but it’s coming anyway. Listen, in a few hours our little world will turn herself right-side-up again, and you will forget about all the ways this lonely night sang you watered down blues and your hands will start to make sense again.   You think you’ve seen every ugly corner of this whole rotten world, but listen: there are an infinite number of things we don’t know and, statistically speaking, at least half of them are probably very, very beautiful.

POST-PANIC ATTACK by Ashe Vernon

(from my second book, Wrong Side of a Fistfight, available here)