'my protagonist is...'

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I want this noise within me to die down.

Alice Notley, from Certain Magical Acts; “Two of Swords,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[katherinestasaph]

Like the word “pulchritude,” which means “beauty” but sounds revolting, the phrase “wintry mix” is unforgivably dishonest. It sounds like something you would bring to a holiday party: toasted hazelnuts, dried cranberries, dark chocolate, tied up in a cellophane bag with maroon and gold ribbons. It sounds like something you would drink at that party: brandy, bitters, sweet vermouth. It sounds like something the host would have on in the background: Bing Crosby, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Coltrane covering “My Favorite Things.” It sounds like sleigh bells at dusk. It sounds like snowflakes drifting from darkness into the light of a streetlamp when the blizzard is just getting started and the hush of rightness has fallen over the world. It sounds wonderful. Too bad. It is a cold, wet, sharp, splashy, slush-creating, hypothermia-inducing abomination, a wrongness falling over the world. A better name for it would be “airborne depravity.” A better name for it would be “meteorological pox.” A better name for it would be “pulchritude.”

The New Yorker (via katherinestasaph)

this is getting notes again and I feel it again

(via katherinestasaph)

[viperslang]

slit

we leave home for a place where beauty is more than an accident between a tree & its season. for mossed words, a grace of shadows.  

in the river, my meticulous swerve trimming the yaw of satinfin swarms. above me, you are a coddled promise, papillae

- silk before the compulsion of elegiac luster, its hauteur,

belled ghosts of // clouds imagined as the torn meanderings in white campion.

the morning comes willed in fierce cochineal. you remain still wrapped in yourself, still fluent with your own bounty;

euphoric as if a ciphering of oak galls. the worn tongue of taproots & temple vipers. under the skin, an intuition for what

concerns itself with the enduring, the unperfectedness. a call for ruminascence. to have sheered you from the leavening,

to have gored the bone from the most raven of ores. to frequent your dark rocks, their notched devotions crying : this, this, this.

i panther in your embattled forests. my blood the colour of floured jewels. wait for your emergence, your voice falling heir to its hoarse fluting -

wait for the rising of you -  shorn cocoon, shunned chrysalis. wait to sleep, coiled in the blackest etchings of your latent wings.

Scherezade Siobhan

[cgcpoems]

so, those that attempt to contact the things that they’ve lost are called necromancers. I get that, we all want to romance the past every once in a while. but what do you call it when, in gusts of nostalgia, you LOVE what’s not there? when you skip the niceties and head straight for that uncommunicable feeling of need like a dreamer to a mirage, when it’s been six weeks and you’re still kissing the right side of the bed before you roll out of it still crying in the soft drink aisle at the grocery store still committing to memory the shape that their spine took as they walked away from you: a question mark without an answer without a question without a reason. I guess this is my way of saying that I need a name for what I’m doing. the quiet just isn’t enough, anymore.

foreign dictionaries

, by

Caitlin Conlon

(via

cgcpoems

)

[galina]

The V&A café is the best museum café ever

[heterotopian]

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” ― Lao Tzu

[earthunboxed-blog-deactivated20]

Las Lajas Sanctuary, Colombia

[staff]

The Origin of Tumblr (and other social networks, fine)

The New Yorker unearths recorded history.

“Tumblr is a bottomless pit, neither good nor evil. In one version of the myth, Tumblr is a reservoir of original unfinished creation. The rest of the Internet is irrigated by rivers and streams of human attention that flow from Tumblr.”

The @newyorker goes on to say that Tumblr is a portal to the underworld, and other true things. 

[wnq-writers]

Some days I’m Van Gogh’s Starry Night other days I’m his suicide letter.

souu-h  (via wnq-writers)

[butteryplanet]

[springironwritings]

Baritone’s Elegy

We walk to the graveyard on a sunny day the grounds by my house, Calvalry. I think of men stately atop equine equals wish I had a horse to feed apples, stable in Queens between the Guatemalan churches and bakeries. I just push a bike instead. Sopronos filmed years ahead before the deaths go again anytime you turn on the television.

We are at the graveyard on a holiday the sun is hot steams the wind as we walk Stones are names stuck to granite like granite sticks to time. A tree would be better; I shouldn’t judge another’s death but don’t spread the ashes just yet

We are at the graveyard on a holiday my mother’s birthday, past tense I still mouth the verbs capped. In my dream, she hasn’t left but when I do, she never said debate the stones so I never did.

We, at the graveyard with a bike death for us, Soprono style, a bush and a plaque for the Baritone man. On my way from Calvalry, I fall they moved the Baritone from Manhattan to Queens dug his body and it sings The scrapes on my knees are roses I kneel at the stone and rest them there. My mother’s birthday is another day,

                  I fall off                   bleed my rose or peonies                   and we’re off                   to the waterfront, to a bar                   where I sit and wait and smile                   for a cab willing to cross the bridge.

[salesonfilm-deactivated20180514]

The underlying issue of the Academy’s failure to recognize black artists is the presumption that baseline experience is white experience and that black life is a niche phenomenon, life with an asterisk. Many of the great classic jazz and blues recordings were marketed as ‘race records.’ To this day, the Academy proceeds as if movies about black experience were race movies. The result is that only narrow and fragmentary views of the lives of African-Americans ever make it to the screen—and I think that this is not an accident. If the stories were told—if the daily lives and inner lives, the fears and fantasies, the historical echoes and the anticipations of black Americans were as copiously unfolded in movies as are those of whites—then lots of white folks would be forced to confront their historical and contemporary shame. They’d no longer be able to claim ignorance of what they’d like not to know—which includes their own complicity in a rigged system.

The Oscar Whiteness Machine by RICHARD BRODY (via salesonfilm)

[ja-dark-deactivated20170602]

Shailja Patel

[writerlypretension]

In dream sequence (I have lost count) God and I sit hunched over and watch the world spin past in sidewalk conversations, curbside

He says I need to choose my allegiances carefully Whispering into my shoulder, How, How, How: (This requires wisdom) before I look up for a moment squinting into unrelenting holiness; He is far away, in his holiness Does he want to be closer? Does he? I stare at my feet while he hugs his knees We sit low like this between two Janus-faced empires Low like this

[writerlypretension]

Tilt;

your forehead against my forehead 
(your head that houses a multitude of thoughts)

This is what i want: 
press your forehead against my forehead 
 pass

(surge, multitude of thoughts and all your intricacies
all your strange ways
all)

if that is what you want 


press

Lean; your head against my head


Tilt; your cheek against my cheek 
(if that is what you want) your forehead against mine, lean

Press;
my head against your shoulder
press

(i am tired 
i’ve grown so tired, where are you?
 i lean into emptiness)

on rising toes my stethoscope lips find 
oscillation

Learned;
 what it is to be my father’s daughter
 as i sit still waiting for new disruption
 not the memory of your last plosives 
 air

Speak; 
your voice trickling sap from trees
 like running water, like falling water
 running

glows; the sum of your thoughts
 the inner sun
my heart
 glows; you are the glow in my heart i wait 


solar flares lick the vacuum of space 
 while my arms grow strong;

lift 
a tall man in my arms
 he stands 
(he laughs in victory; i was forged in the terrible silence)

Sit;
 still in prayer, rock 
i became the beggar became God
became prayer became sound,

humming; 


There are many prayers
 There is one:

(your forehead against my forehead 
your words 
falling fruit from bursting trees
your mouth
your upturned lips
your mouth;

there is only one prayer)

;oscillating air particles
 will it travel?

Bruised.
 i collect stop signs. as talismans. as charms. as spells to guard my borders.

Ache


i collect stop signs to burn them i burn them 
smoke rises
i burn them and pray as it rises

Lean;
 Press

[springironwritings]

Finding Your Old

http://thewhalesings.com/2015/07/01/finding-your-old/

A new short story entitled “Finding Your Old”

[writerlypretension]

Want, Get

Upturned palms wait to catch sun, cup sun catch rain instead somewhere a whistling kettle marks epiphany inside while the brief but insistent beeping of the green man marks epiphany outside; somewhere you are a pedestrian too. The rain is not romantic in this setting, no parched and dying desert to cup ecstatic relief, It is the jarring knowing of disappointment, that moment an upturned hand seeking sun, craving sun meets rain Gets me to asking, why wait? Inside gravity is overturned Outside my arms lengthen like some awful plastic man Stretch to reach and grab Wants, Gets Wants. Gets. Arms lengthened in awful reachings punch sun, strangle sun Outside the green man glows bright and cheerful