[lunchboxpoems]

[sunrisetune]

'Light Ghazal', by Hala Alyan

I’m terrible at parties, secrets, and money. I want my stars sexy: fast light that’s prophetic. No nonsense about physics, refraction, past light.

Even in Barcelona, I can’t turn a bike. I let you change my mind: free will and wet hair. One night, I let you pour white wine. I drink its aghast light.

Happy now? We’re both like this—full of risk and nowhere to put it. We sidle up to strangers with dry cigarettes and ask, Light?

I want small churches and noisy continents. I want you. I want you better. I want you moved by what moves me: God, glass, light.

You like the line about men bored with beautiful women, as though boredom’s the prize, as though those peonies weren’t a gaslight.

It’s O.K. I play dumb. I count codes under my breath. I circle you like a devoted planet. I see the whiskey bottle. I forecast light.

I’m a better gambler than wife: the house fills with music and your singing. Dear enabler. Dear truce. I know you see the moon’s steadfast light.

I know you remember Madrid, Istanbul, pinecones, that trip to Iceland. How every midnight had a sun. How we clung to its last light.

[lunchboxpoems]

JAMES A. PEARSON

[apocryphics]

[littlewildmother]

Studies show that engaging in ritualized behavior significantly improves outcomes on measures of grief and feelings of control, even when the person participating in the ritual has little or no belief in the ritual’s power. Just a reminder for no one in particular.

[littlewildmother]

Research has revealed that, while rituals are universal across human cultures, the content and actions of those rituals vary widely even when they have the same intended purpose. This suggests that it is not the actions that matter, but that you are taking any action at all and naming it ritual. It can be an elaborate ritual with dozens of moving parts and participants, or it can be as simple as lighting a candle alone with the intent to remember someone.

The healing is in the doing.

[weltenwellen]

Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead

[redstonedust]

i love having the hubris to go 'sure i'll try that, how hard can it be' about every creative skill under the sun. jack of all trades master of shit fuck but who says you have to be a master??? maybe i want to sew a mediocre plushie and code a janky mod and write a bland song. im having fun. im in my lane. im learning and im thriving.

[funeral]

Freud concludes that the uncanny “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”  The idea of the uncanny then is at heart concerned with the fact that the very environment of the home, which is supposed to offer shelter, comfort and safety to us amid the uncertainties of everyday life, is in fact infected with repressed anxiety-inducing ambiguities, unresolved histories and unacknowledged losses.  We don’t want to know what they are, but they keep coming back to haunt us nevertheless.

The idea of the haunted house has been constantly revisited in popular literature and film…[t]he repetition and reworking of the haunted house theme testifies to how strongly we are attracted by the attempt to expose and overcome the terror induced by this realization – that all of our houses are haunted all of the time.

–The Haunted House and The Uncanny

[herheadinfilmspodcast]

The Places of Marguerite Duras (Michelle Porte, 1976)

[elizabethanism]

There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.

Simone Weil

[letterful]

— from Italo Calvino’s (unrealised) plan for a journal.

[antigonick]

“Roland Barthes says that even if a thing seems to be the same as another thing, treat it as if it were different. This is a behavioral exhortation, make no mistake. In Deleuze’s meditation Difference and Repetition, he too suggests that even a thing that repeats has differences worth noting, worth praying to. He doesn’t say the word pray but I know what he means. I don’t even mean pray when I say the word pray. I mean a different thing, but I use this word. (I’m not spiritual—this is doctrinaire—so PRAY TO WHOM would be my question.) In a not-so-strange fold, or LITERARY PUCKER even, this exemplifies my current point: a word seems to be the same but is in possession of differences worth noting, worth jacking off to, in other words. Super-sexy differences.”

— Harry Dodge, My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing

[english-idylls]

Some snow scenes in Claude Monet’s paintings.

[women-loving-art]

Dorothy Allison, from Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature, 1994

[gatheringbones]

[”Write your stories any way you have to frame it to get it out, any time you can get it done. Use any trick. I want to know what it was that you looked at unflinchingly, even if you did not know what you were seeing at the time. If nothing else works, start by writing that story for me. Imagine me. I was born to die. I know that. If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year-old, the hope of a remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I’ll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.”] 

[jellogram]

I think the first step towards the life you want is often to just say yes to more things. Accept that coffee invitation from your coworker even if it seems awkward. Sign up for that free class at the library that you're not sure you'll like. Join that club. Book that tour. Say yes to as many things as you can and kill the part of your brain that gut-reacts with a no.

[weltenwellen]

Cameron Awkward-Rich,  from "The Child Formerly Known As _________"

[itsyourcalling]

[lovecrumbss]

swans by hilma klint