round-up: 3/23
reading recs, quotations, & a free event this weekend
Happy Friday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
To all my local Bay Area friends: I’ll be selling some zines / clothes / jewelry / collages / stickers / pins / croc charms / etc. this Sunday from 11am-5pm.
Entry is free. Come say hi!
& on a random note:
I’m obsessed with Valentino’s Fall 2023 show. I love it when designers embrace queer fashion. Look!
What I read this week:
For Hunger, Margaret Ronda
Orphanotrophia, Andrew Kozma
where bells begin, Tessa Micaela1
Quotations:
You resemble the dark.
-Margaret Ronda
I wanted to eat all day. To become all body, to take the entire world in.
-Margaret Ronda
I once was and am
a child
-Margaret Ronda
I have not earned it, I said, though I was famished. Coughing up salt water.
-Margaret Ronda
To love is territory and darkness.
-Margaret Ronda
Woods right in the center of town. I almost hit a deer one night, driving past. He bounded out of the headlights and I held my breath for miles.
-Margaret Ronda
The gristle of my body
is too tough to chew, so the world pretends I have skin,
that I am not an organ wheezing in the sterile air.
-Andrew Kozma
O Hunger, the only god I’ve ever known.
-Andrew Kozma
There is no hope.
There is my open mouth, my swollen tongue.
-Andrew Kozma
In the utter dark
I will hold you close and tell you stories of the light.
-Andrew Kozma
Once, I counted every bone in my body,
each to each. They added up, but still I found myself wanting.
-Andrew Kozma
o knows time is a fact.
o knows it stings.
-Tessa Micaela
o endures.
o endures the fact of fear.
o endures feeling, one way or another.
-Tessa Micaela
it is quite natural, o thinks, to be pummeled by memory.
-Tessa Micaela
o dreams of a hand between the legs.
o has legs and o has hands.
o has the temperature of twilight.
o wishes to run to the river, to get caught in brambles.
-Tessa Micaela
the stars devour our bodies, cut gashes in the night.
-Tessa Micaela
As if we’re allowed to speak
in anything but a teeth-shattering
screech of yearning.
-Sonia Greenfield, “Scylla and Charybdis Speak: A Poem for Two Voices”
But God forbid
a nymph should want more than
her scant share.
-Sonia Greenfield, “Scylla and Charybdis Speak: A Poem for Two Voices”
We are built of longing; we are
made of nothing but desire.
-Sonia Greenfield, “Scylla and Charybdis Speak: A Poem for Two Voices”
Every woman knows
we’re supposed to be thankful
for their scraps. Every woman
knows we were meant to be empty.
-Sonia Greenfield, “Scylla and Charybdis Speak: A Poem for Two Voices”
And to have come this way
for nothing. To see my own skin’s
shallow glow against the cool
wood of the porch swing, holding out my arms.
-Joanna Klink, “Porch Swing”
Love is quiet. Something that is
not love barrels over it.
-Joanna Klink, “Porch Swing”
Bitter future, bitter future, a round dance in a briar of roses . . .
-Rene Char, tr. Mark Hutchinson
I dream of a benevolent country.
-Rene Char, tr. Mark Hutchinson
A poem is all furious ascension.
-Rene Char, tr. Mark Hutchinson
I will write no poem of consent.
-Rene Char, tr. Mark Hutchinson
Have a great weekend—
& look at these cute eyeball rings I made for myself:
-Despy Boutris
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I love Tessa Micaela’s work. This book was fun because it’s bizarre, so I inherently read it in a little cyborg voice. & now I highly recommend reading a book with Loretta Modern or Ms. Casey in mind. & maybe ask yourself: Whose voice should one use while reading your work? A very fun exercise.
"A poem is all furious ascension."
beautiful... "a poem is, after all, fiery lines".