What does the god of your childhood look like?
A soft apparition pigeoned in the attic,
a wound eating you one year at a time?
If you could destroy the story before it started,
would you— go back—before the unnameable thing?
If you could return to your father at the foot of the bed,
Would you swallow you sisters whole to save them?
~Rachel mc kibbens
Mother,
I have pasts inside me I did not bury properly.
Some nights,
your daughter tears herself apart yet heals in the morning.
~Ijeoma Umebinyuo
You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.
I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.
You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.
You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,
And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.
– Brian Patten
1. Natalia Drepina
2. anthropomorphicadolls
3. anthropomorphicadolls
The red night lights are flat moons.
They are dull with blood.
I am the sun, in my white coat,
Gray faces, shuttered by drugs,
follow me like flowers.
~Sylvia Plath
It’s not so bad, my darling. Being dead.
It’s like being alive, only colder.
Things taste less.
They feel less.
You forget, little by little, who you were.
~Catherynne M. Valente
back into the dark.
the old familiar passage.
back into the gross of lowborn dreams.
H.C
“A savage desire for strong emotions and
sensations burns inside me:
a rage against this soft-tinted,
shallow, standardized and sterilized life,
and a mad craving to smash something up,
a department store, say,
or a cathedral, or myself.”
~Hermann Hesse, "Steppenwolf" (1927)
“My mother boils seawater.
It sits all afternoon simmering on the stovetop, almost two gallons in a big soup pot.
The windows steam up and the house smells like a storm.
In the evening, a crust of salt is all that’s left at the bottom of the pot.
My mother scrapes it out with a spoon. We each lick a fingertip and dip them in the salt and it’s softer than you’d think, less like sand and more like snow.
We lay our fingertips on our tongues, right in the middle. It tastes like salt but like something else, too—wide, and dark.
It tastes like drowning, or like falling asleep on the shore and only waking up when the tide has come up to your feet and you wonder if you’d gone on sleeping, would you have sunk?”
"He ran his tongue over her bruised knees and she was immediately overwhelmed by the intimacy between skin and bone,
by the feeling of his wet front teeth,
by the wetness of her purple and yellow trauma swelling just beneath the surface.
It was always there, an invisible pollution, but finally it had risen and
—dear God—somebody wanted to kiss it.
Sometimes her body was a swimming pool full of dead bees and foliage, and sometimes she liked that better.
It kept the delicate boys away.
When she was little and lived by the sea, she swam a lot and was fearless with her body.
She let herself be thrashed and turned about by wave after wave, this way and that way.
Her grandmother always said Never turn your back on the ocean, because you never knew what might be coming in.
She used to think about sharks and stingrays, then tidal waves, then she thought about a horizon full of big white sails.
Still, she always felt safe in the water, and she welcomed the invasion."
~Tati Tibble