Women Read About Themselves in Color.

@womenreadaboutthemselvesincolor

I prefer poetry over everything, every goddamned thing. poetry/freewriting © why, hallo there... sweet like brown sugar sound tastes like this heart(s) being unzipped

6,727 posts

It's my 14 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

#14 year tumblrversary #tumblr milestone

hellotomyoldheart

quotes i can’t stop thinking about

part two

“what i sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.” - sarah kane, crave.

“tomorrow, on those long sofas of group therapy, we’ll both claim we want to die. but we’ll mean: please someone convince us to stay around.” - eireann corrigan, privileges (for christina)

“i think of what it means to have survived this long.” - dave harris, 69th street movie theatre.

“why do you weep? did you think i was immortal?” - louis xiv.

“sure, i make plans, i make plans but i don’t want to go. i make plans because i know i should want to go; i know sometimes i would have wanted to go- it’s just not that fun having fun when you don’t want to have fun, mom.” - sabrina benaim, explaining my depression to my mother.

“—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, i love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘i love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ that’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. it’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. psst, you. hey kid. yes you.” - donna tartt, the goldfinch.

“i never had any friends later like the ones i had when i was twelve. jesus, did you?” - stephen king, the body.

“i would have swallowed that bullet.” - jeanann verlee, 40 love letters.

“i have tried on all your clothes, and still nothing fits like the blood.” - hanif abdurraqib, the ghost of marvin gaye plays dozens with the pop charts.

“that boy is not made of fists, that boy learned how to braid my hair.” - brenna twohy, the fisherman takes the fish home & tells her he loves her.

“he is a weapon, a killer. do not forget it. you can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.” - madeline miller, the song of achilles.

“there is a difference between fact & truth. the fact is she overdosed. the truth is he killed her.” - olivia gatwood, life of the party.

“say you were unlaced by a language. say you prayed to a shivering glacier. say you ate even the grief of the honey. say you took the razor moon in your lung. say you went rigid inside the nights throat. say you cleaved your breath with a hammer. say you rose like a flood in your drunken heart.” - jeremy radin, a world.

“there you are. your face wonderfully frozen, your funny joke, it took you so long- i’ll never tell. you’re safe here, with me.” - phil kaye, the internet speaks back to the author.

If blushing backwards was a thing, would you sit me back inside myself when you’re done with me?

5

1. audre – helps me to stay woke, whole, and accountable

2. mastering the melancholy

3. mastering the melancholy until it is almost nonexistent - or at least a dryness of itself, something to return to for nostalgic purposes, something to say ‘yes, because of you i am here, stronger and kinder to deal with

4. i can’t collect grief; i can only collect what it does for me

5. i can only collect what it does for me

6. this month is about grown-ness

7. this month is about joy.

4

I have to apologize to myself for not writing but what better excuse than that of the one that I’ve been living? An excuse, nonetheless, I understand.

*

I have crawled softly and suddenly back into this life with so much gratitude and bewilderment, that even this keyboard feels differently, the pen feels differently. Like I am moving marshmallows in my hands, like I am explaining to God where I’ve been.

*

I am crawling back into this life quietly and by myself at the moment. M is out filming and my parents are leaving the house to me, alone, such a gem. My sister is gone, it is really just me now. For now. How do I say what has happened to me in the past several months? It is like I am writing a letter to an old friend or lover, again, apologizing, disclaiming.

*

Well, I have lost friends. Gained friends. Gained an engagement. (!!!) I am someone’s fiancé now, and with that means I will be someone’s wife. I have fallen, fallen, and fallen in love again, I have grieved without crying and I have praised without sentences. This is that get up and go love, that grown love, that diamond without being a diamond love, that love that hangs from you love, that scared love, that astonished love, that mature love, that silly love. This is that look how far we’ve come love, this is that your father doesn’t know what kind of beautiful and kind son he has love but I do love I am marrying that love this is that sort of love, this is that I know your mother didn’t protect you the way she should have love but I am here now love I am here now love I am here now, love.

*

I’ve never wanted to be a lover’s mother and I still don’t. The difference with M is this: I am a nourisher now. Before I was the tree without the leaves. Before, I was loving with my hands out. Stumbling around the dark. Now, let’s be real. You don’t really need hands to love. How many fingers does your heart have?

*

It seems me and M.A.’s friendship has come to an end. I have been blamed for not reaching out. Again, the hands thing. It is like the expectation of biting the slender flesh of wrists and then saying ‘how hard is it for you to hand me your hand?’

*

It becomes tenderly exhausting - the absence of reciprocation. If your pain leaves the distance between you and I to be so large and defining, so loud and uncompromising, I can’t do anything but bow down to it and leave you be.

*

One of these days, we’ll wonder why old best friends don’t always mean new bridesmaids. But it’s saddening nonetheless. Is pain so worth it that we can’t step outside each other and say ‘hey, that was my bad. That was on me.’ Like we don’t all need the grace of being able to move forward with our feet and our faults.

*

I am fortunate that some of the distress is distilled - that I don’t always have to monitor it, combat it, play cat and mouse with it. I have grown the way a circle does, have encapsulated the angst of this amusing adulthood until I became the adage of a sadness I could finally overcome.

*

It just feels good to feel good.

*

The bravest thing about all this is you always go back to where you started - for me, that is the belly of the poem, the thigh of the hurt that’s not the hurt anymore, but the lesson, the lesson that’s the adage, the adage that’s the love.

2 - superheroes

you go in to go in talk shit to talk shit not everyone does things the way you do them i am realizing you are just another person flawed and contradicting superheroes are only in stories this is a 27 year old truth about to be 28 not disappointed just aware not disappointed just observant not disappointed just matter of fact like when someone walks out of a room and the conversation stops like everyone in this house can talk to my mother but somehow not to each other like this shit is old, mold, drawn up and ubiquitous-like like i don’t want to be here anymore have only ever showed my face to my poems and lovers who didn’t have faces of their own trust is a vault something everyone wants without wanting i remember you yelled at my mother were mean and ready to play the joneses and the music got louder in my head than it did on the vinyl and that was my mistake i’ll admit fingers frozen in a bed of big-headed flowers, the dirt the only evidence i was really alive that night, watching people shrink into people, superheroes in the background like when will we stopping taking the fall for this?

17

o how all of the men in my life somehow combined, except M

o miles davis can’t solve everything

o aloneness is a project and how i begin to wish it was a solution and not that white elephant in the room, making me walk on my head instead of my feet

o if i can’t be the needy lover, then i need a needy lover

o it’s just the way it has to be.

8

o warm as a replayed vinyl

o what more do you want from me? i have already traded my eyes for your ex lover’s mouth

o can taste her new man wherever I go

o that’s the way love goes.

--------------------

o you are the only sound skin makes.

o what old poems?

o i am not as thoughtful as i used to be.

o i’d prefer your cabinet heart

o discernment is an ocean

o i keep walking backwards

o did i close the wrong people?

--------------------

o blowing on the earth.

o starting the wrong fire

o it is easier to feel in lists

o it is easier to love in lists

o when you left, i quit

o nobody asked anything

o that’s when i knew

o love is just anger with new teeth.

--------------------

1 - ‘it’s all good.’

to forget is to love harder and more consistently on top of things.

to paste and paste and paste until nothing else can be seen except the effort.

i am done with the closeness.

have given distance a chance for a change.

language is not what fails me; it’s context and circumstance.

the romance of how to respond in the right way

or how to walk away.

the totality of

streamlining

feelings until they are advances

made on the wrong person,

a ring.

the one your boyfriend got nobody’s help picking out.

because he is accustomed to not

asking anybody for anything,

even loved ones.

and you are beginning to be

that way as well.

that time your mother hurt you,

really hurt you,

and then asked an hour later if y’all were going to be mad at each other for the rest of the night and you replied

‘it’s all good,’

you meant it.

the nearness of a dismissal to be left alone

in a bedroom with too much stuff in it, a fire waiting to happen.

or at the least, a panic attack

about who has it made

more.

the loner or the guilt-ridden.

you ride the opportunity of that choice

until you are blue in the face and your sister comes into your room

without knocking and asks with her eyes and her eyes only

‘why you do cry so much, is that your thing or something?’

30

i check for each sound like it is something i myself made; i wonder if you

do the same.

trust comes in layers; and it ceases in layers.

a gradual monster.

i slowly peel your cape away as if the ocean has never

fit this relationship.

i hold onto things.

in my mind, am louder than i am in real life.

just because you’re my mother, doesn’t mean you don’t get petty too.

29

1. my biggest mistake was letting you in and not the thunder 2. i've laid across fires just so i wouldn't have to swallow oceans 3. each lover represents a barter 4. each barter represents a testimony of how many teeth i lost defending me defending you

5. there are some women who set love as a goal; will burst forth from their flesh and call men movers, i have never met a mover; only someone who wanted to shift the sound in me, move it around until everything in me were darts that could be thrown, water that could be tossed, fights that could only be fought and not transferred to the next woman, more willing than i've ever been

6. this time, forgiveness is a kiss on the forehead and i have wiped my hands clear across my cheeks to only find that the blood has dried and not dissipated

22

I have a dream where I wash up on a beach and I am made of just water and nothing else and there is a burning house in front of me and I have to proof my life wasn’t a gift given back to me since I was arrogant enough before to think if I could convince the earth to sit down in my hands, then surely I could get you to be still long enough to fall back in love with me. *

The question was, do I have anything left that I don’t want and could possibly give to you. The answer is always.

8

1. you’re always congratulating the wrong things

2. how to begin hurt? body down or body up? i watch you catapult from the pulse of summer, land in the winter of my tiredness and wonder why i don’t move as fast as you, who i don’t love as loud as you, why the mere act of breathing sends me into a dazed panic sometimes, that to leave me an inch of tenderness would be the equivalent of setting the pace of a thousand suns to burn our skin together until we learn how to get along

3. my girlfriends say it’s not worth it

4. that i should have married a doctor

5. i tell them not all healers can heal

25

o the hardest thing about becoming hard is when you were never really hard to begin with

o my mother is the meridian between me and my father. as i get older, i am like the edge of a knife, a fish swallowing swords, sinking in mud, flirting with water.

o with my whole arm down my throat, i pull out a damp bouquet of sunflowers and present them to my father - this is the bottle of our relationship, the sum of everything we’ve held in hands hidden behind our backs, constantly in the midst of the soft attack it takes to prove you are good and worthy, present and not futile

o the biggest thing with me has always been where can i find the most blue in a picture, a person, a pulse and can i take over that blue, become a thief of it, render it or distill it, teach it about myself

o i am a headless ocean, a knuckle of earth, that split lip of a small god

22 - Father Time

The thinnest line I could ever draw for you is that sweet meridian my father never failed to compare me to, the meanness of a brown earth we idly worship, mistaking time for tenderness. There’s no sense in telling you that it was not my choice, alone, to leave. In dreams, I come back with headless flowers in my hands and handless kisses in my heart. I have marked calendars with the firmness of marriage and the softness of divorce. Each opposite of us and what we have merits a new mistake and I begin loving you all over again, renaming the meridian and finding new heads for the necks of forgiving flowers.

5

Sad when he doesn't call, annoyed when he does. He can't win, and I don't want him to.

3

1. year 4 and you should be doing more

2. i break up one fight to start another

3. you chose me when i was a wolf, when i wanted to be a lion

4. mom says to pray/i try/can only pull poems from places that precede me

5. i am a planet of all you could do and want/you choose sleep/the stalker of my heart/i have finished with greed

6. some things run out

7. some things run

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