[sassafranski]

that awkward moment between birth and death

[madgirlscosm-deactivated2025051]

(excerpted from Leila Chatti's poem: "Tea", published in Missouri Review)

[typiing-deactivated20240430]

i’m like “i don’t give a fuck” & then have an anxiety attack

[feral-ballad]

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Instructions for Traveling West”

[two-bees-poetry]

[stay-close]

“Please stop destroying what is left of your heart by constantly thinking about things that have broken you.”

— Unknown

[bleakandhollow]

there was no need for my feed to be this specific

[9fruit]

happy touch starved emotionally deprived autumn to all who celebrate. Yay

[geryone]

Hard Loving, Marge Piercy

[kaleshi-naari]

love language " chai piyoge?? "

[peachydreamxx]

The Purrfect Boyfriend

my @hdowlpost gift for @sitaz 💛

drawing this was just ‼️‼️ SO FUN

I just love them both so much, and this prompt was amazing 💛

Again, @apricitydays-lazynights where would I be without your support? a hefty load of credit goes to apri for all the cat reference photos!

[girlcave]

So obsessed with your cat animagus draco that I made fanart of your fanart 🫣

[peachydreamxx]

😭 omg!!! look at them!!! I’m gonna pass out this is so beautiful and perfect 💖💖💖💖

[deadithurts]

andrew garfield saying, “i hope this grief stays with me because it’s all the unexpressed love that i didn’t get to tell her” about his mothers passing is so gut wrenchingly beautiful because we rarely talk about the love we want to express but can’t, not because you’re not brave enough to say it out loud but because they’re not here to listen to it anymore. calling grief the love you never had the chance to share makes it less of a burden and more of something you want to keep and not something terrible you want to move on from. i love love how everything about grief always comes down to “what is grief if not love persevering?”

[valtsv]

phrases like "the house always wins" and "it's on the house" but used to imply that the building you're in is alive and personally invested in the situation

[valtsv]

the house always wins

[inkskinned]

you have to be sexy but you have to be sexy in a way that's kind of bloody. you learn this early because you are wearing a ruffled skirt and the snow around your ankles kicks little sand particles against your calves. baby's first catcall. welcome to sexiness! welcome to the eyesore of your own body!

you have to be sexy like high heels. like sculpted eyebrows. like lean stomach and highly treated hair. you have to be sexy like youth is sexy, which means you have to be sexy like boxtox and plastic. a 30 year old can be sexy but she's not going to be bloody, and they like the bloodiness of it. a 30 year old is sexy when she is a whiskey glass and a wooden desk.

but you need to be sexy like an open mouth. you need to be sexy like a bitten apple. like plucked skin and white-knuckling the waxing kit.

so sex is a performance, not an enjoyment. for a while, you just assumed everyone else was also in on the joke - nobody actually likes sex that much, right? like, some men probably do, but why would you? it is like a gender - your gender is sexy. your gender is the performance of sex. you are thigh highs and garter belts. which, to be fair, do make you feel sexy.

part of what does make sex good is that you can tell that other people want you, which means the performance of sexiness is both bloody and wanted, which is good, which means you are winning at having a body. being wanted is the prize. being wanted is the thing you are searching for, not hope. you think you are looking for a soft grave in easy loam, but that is bloody but not sexy. to be sexy you must be bloody like a red open sign. bloody like a handprint. this will make you wanted.

any wanted or unwanted body is subject to supply and demand, which is to say that the more demand, the better you are valued. you must be highly demanded to be valued. this is stated in matter-of-fact by some men. sometimes it is a priest that says it, and sometimes it is a podcaster, and sometimes it is the 45th president of the united states of america.

(if you do not have any experience with being told your value, i want you to grab the nearest bird to you and i want you to crush it into a thin paste in your hand. spit into the center, and then hold your fingers closed tight around it for days and days, long after the rot has set in. feel bones itch inside of your fist. this is only a fraction of what it actually feels like, but it will suffice for a moment.)

good sex feels like you have earned their desperation. you have earned your own value. for a while you operated under the understanding that everyone knew about the power structure, even him. that their desire to take you - the violence of it - means that you must desire to be caught. little prince, guardian fox - you would rather have cut your own arm off. you liked the secret, cunning little voice you keep tucked into a box. you think you are fucking me. i am not even here right now. you are fucking what i conned you into perceiving. this is a painting, not a person. dominion over the body before all things.

so you bend your body like a wheat shaft and learn the steps so perfectly that it almost seems graceful. (if you do not have experience faking your own connection to your body and sexuality, cut each of your articles of clothing just a little bit incorrectly. pour fishbones into each of your meals. this way, you will experience the average noon on a tuesday.)

you have to be sexy like light spilled over a desk, but not desperate. not a noose. you can't be sexy like an electric guitar, you are the acoustic. you have to be on top of the bull but you can't have control over the animal.

okay, okay. the little rabbit of your heart went to sleep so long ago that winter has ravaged your concept of the human soul. there's something very-bad inside you, something that has taken over, a little fetid and rabid animal, angry and hurting and willing to bite first.

oh but even that's a pain that's sexy. open your mouth. be careful not to let the canines show.

[geryone]

Blackouts, Justin Torres

[sebbianas]

“Do you regret him?” Harry asked, his eyes still at the picture of his dad smiling brightly at another boy. Said boy, years older now, sitting beside him.

Regulus’ thumb brushes over James’ bright smile and answered softly, “I regret a lot of things in my life, Harry, but loving James will never be one of them.”

[geryone]

Red Ocher, Jessica Poli

[inkskinned]

i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

[inkskinned]

when i wrote this 2 years ago, i put in the tags the other thing that was happening: right before covid, i had changed my tune. instead of telling my students here is what you can't write, i asked them to please choose something that brought them joy. choose something beautiful. in college, i am not looking for a specific topic, there is no "winning" the essay, i am just making sure that you know how to format an essay and accurately cite your sources.

the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. our colleges are owned by the same person. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but -

the world is pretty bleak right now, and i asked my kids to write about joy, because i couldn't stomach what is unsaid in the above post: kids were writing too much about gun violence. they were writing about blood smeared across the hallways of their middle schools. i would get essays about how they huddled under a desk while the bell rang around them, this strange and eerie tune. one of the only times i told my siblings out loud i love you was while we had an active shooter. i was locked in a friend's room up in a dorm while we all huddled around unwashed pastel dollar-store bowls. we called our families and loved ones. what else was there to do.

i couldn't read any more of those accounts. how cowardly.

i wish i could say i was braver, that i heard the weight of what they were handling and was able to bear it, but it adds up. i had 50 to 100 students. every semester, at least 3 of them would have visceral memories of a school shooting. their friends and neighbors and loved ones. their hands shaking around their phone as they type out this message might be my last one. i couldn't read that and stay calm. i had to call my mom. sob to my therapist - how the fuck do i resolve that. how do i help them? we both still have to go to school in the morning - me and my students. how am i supposed to just read that and then go on and teach them about prepositions? i can't even promise they won't ever have to experience that again. i feel like we're just waiting for trauma and instead i'm showing them how to keep their commas in the right place. how the fuck do either of us navigate that space?

i forget it can be different. a few years ago, a series of roof tiles fell off our building and made a loud scattered popping noise when they met the ground. i remember the strange accidental culture shock: most of my students went quiet and flattened to the floor; i leapt up and & turned off the lights & shoved my desk against the door. there were three kids who hadn't been raised in america. i remember the look on their faces; shocked and confused, nervously laughing because they hadn't assumed a threat. the gentle hands of their american friends helping them get down; shushing in a way i can only describe as kind, sympathetic. one of my students whispered you get used to it.

how can i see how they are suffering and then still ask them such an incredibly selfish request: please just write something about love, about joy, about something that reminds you of passion.

i get novels in return. technically, i have a page limit, but i never enforce it. every semester, students are delighted by the prospect. i get essays about being a dog show judge and about the history of the throw rug and about how prismacolor chooses certain paints. about glitter controversies and about their favorite albums and their role models who helped them come out as gay. students came in with visuals and little movies they made. they would go above and beyond just to ask their heroes i have this assignment. will you tell me about what joy means to you? i have records of interviews from writers and tv producers and youtube stars. i hear stories about tracking down the recipe for their grandmother's soup and making bread with their uncle and learning about dance from other cultures. they put their whole heart into it.

i said: this is just for your freshman english class! you do not have to try this hard! i am just one teacher in a million!

my students looked up to me, coated in the viscera and insincerity of their lives; this harrowing space so slick with their own mortality, their childhoods never awarded to them. they do not have the same promise of future. they have never assumed they would live forever. love is not in an arrow-speared heart for them; it has always been too fleeting to tattoo. if they catch it, they release it back into the wild, horrified by how little territory it has left. they wish it well but do not keep it for long. they have always been aware of the cost of their own body.

and they said: it brings me joy, which means it's time well spent.

something about that. something about the fact they can find it anyway: i wish i could write each of them my own essay, and it will be full of all the words you're not supposed to use. ribs and teeth and middle fingers. i wish they related to that, that in their heart were only poems about falling asleep and soft blankets and galaxies. every rainbow peony cliche. i wish i could hold their hand and push the desk in front of the door and say: i got you now. it's gonna be okay.