round-up: 4/17
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Here’s what I have for you today:
To read
Quotations
Tweets
To read:
We’re Taking a Stand Against Literary Journals that Charge Submission Fees
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Could Following Joan Didion's Writing Routine Make Me Write Like Joan Didion?
‘Yellowjackets’ Shows Us the Teenage Girlhood We Were Hungry For
Quotations:
I want the word death. I want the word God. I also want peonies and the color blue. The words are growing in the field [...] like flowers, and I pick the ones I like.
-Mary Ruefle
everything reds to cacophony.
-Shana Bulhan
i just want to be a girl incapacitated for hours
-Shana Bulhan
i love you like collapse
-Shana Bulhan
i need to citizen my longing
-Shana Bulhan
I try letting the woods in. I wear all green to remember that I am real.
-Dani Smotrich-Barr
To really listen is to trust that we have all been cut by dissonance. To not lose yours through the funnel but clang it, angry tender against mine.
-Dani Smotrich-Barr
Of course, some cities can be worn instead of bodies. Isn’t that why we all came here.
-Dani Smotrich-Barr
Autumn falls inevitably, teething on its vowel shifts.
-Dani Smotrich-Barr
It is raining now and only I am here: brief miracle.
-Dani Smotrich-Barr
I want to remain permeable.
-Dani Smotrich-Barr
Every few pages: “This has been the most terrible day of my life.”
-Kate Ellis, “Matrilineal Descent”
When the forest is cut down
the earth replaces her losses.
When we lose our first families
we grow new ones.
-Kate Ellis, “Matrilineal Descent”
Persephone and Demeter
parted in a field.
She was playing on the grass
when the earth opened up.
-Kate Ellis, “Matrilineal Descent”
I was the first son my mother bore / that lived.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
How I would
like to believe in passion again,
wind churning through our bodies.
Calf muscles seizing.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
I, ghost, took you, ghost, to be my lawful—
my body still craving to be broken into
like a window; yours the rock that smashes.
-Steve Bellin-Oka, Tet
How little I understood the loss of you would etch my future skin like pavement cracks.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
If a poem is a prayer, which it is,
-Steve Bellin-Oka
An orchard white with broken
blossoms, strewn fruit fallen.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
When / two people wake in a house / and do not touch each other—
-Steve Bellin-Oka
I’ve learned to read / the fear in your body.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
All afternoon the shipyard
burned: black columns of smoke
corroding the October air.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
Fire / is a taste, acetate on the tongue.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
The body is a charred room / abandoned to the air.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
Sometimes I wanted to go and live in a place apart forever, a place where I could roll around in the dirt and lick things.
-Lauren Slater
I stand beneath a cumulus cloud—feeling no joy, / no deliverance.
-Megan Denton Ray
This I know for certain: I was muddy, but I was lovable.
-Megan Denton Ray
I dreamt of slinging
peach pits into the creek behind our house.
For years, I dreamt of drowning in that creek,
or anywhere, really.
-Megan Denton Ray
What’s more intimate than swimming
in the ocean with your beloved? O God, the slick.
The spray.
-Megan Denton Ray
Thinking is almost always a kind of prayer.
-Ben Fama
Prayer is whatever you say on your knees.
-Ben Fama
She’s become transparent / as a sliver of soap.
-Kate Ellis, “Matrilineal Descent”
The thing about good stories is that they trust their readers to come to their own conclusions sometimes. Good stories understand that sometimes, inevitably, those conclusions will be wrong, but they also understand that the risk is worth it.
The anti-aging sector has long used the language of “feeling like yourself again” as a sales tactic. It perpetuates the idea that you, as you are now, are not the real you. It capitalizes on the innately human quest for identity and convinces you that you will not be real until you are "beautiful". It conditions you to prioritize the imagined self — a self that not only doesn’t exist, but will never exist — over your present self. It encourages you to pursue living in the past (“I want to feel like myself again”) or the future (“I’ll go to the beach when I finally lose weight”) in lieu of living in the now. It keeps you from being in the present moment (which, to my limited knowledge, is kind of the point of life).
This has been such a hard time to write poems, for all of us, I think. And I don’t like redemptive poems. If the redemption comes just by chance, okay, but I don’t like poems that push toward or try for redemption. In one of my poems for this next book, I said, “There are too many poems about light.” There are so many poems—now that I’ve said it, if you haven’t noticed it, you’re going to start—that always end up with light. And it’s like, where did you learn that? That’s something I probably learned from therapy—doing it and having it. Don’t have false resolutions and false redemptions. Poems don’t have to resolve. They don’t have to save the situation
I don’t ask about the procedure of skinning a dead animal but understand. One creates distance from the thing that is held. There is blood on the hands, always.
-Julia Madsen
Desire. Lord, the things / I know & wish to unknow.
-Ayokunle Falomo
How difficult / it is to resist metaphor.
-Ayokunle Falomo
How exacting it is to unknot the imagined / self from the self that inhabits this body now.
-Ayokunle Falomo
I am interested in repair / Without shame. I am / Interested in restitution / With anger.
-Charif Shanahan
I belonged / nowhere and I wanted company / in the flicker of night.
-Natalie Scenters-Zapico
What I wouldn’t give / to be a stranger.
-Natalie Scenters-Zapico
You have faith in quiet things. / Live-oaks. Nightfall.
-Laura Paul Watson
i’m addicted / to feeling. are you not set aflush by the gall of a streetlight / mimicking the moon?
-Anthony Thomas Lombardi
In addition to tiger stripes, I’ve also seen cellulite called “fancy fat” and upper-lip hair called “angel hair.” As someone who has cellulite, a dark lady-mustache courtesy of my Italian forefathers, and stretch marks, these twee terms don’t soothe me; they make me feel patronized and somehow marketed to, like a girlboss lurks ‘round the bend ready to sell me a Fancy Fat Smoothing Loofah, Angel Hair Bleaching Cream, or Tiger Stripe Taming Tonic. Pass.
The content that grates my soul most profoundly is often grating because of the reception, the Discourse, and not necessarily the content.
I am uncomfortable existing as a product. I am not a product, but it can be hard to separate out, and protect, in our current extremely online era, the part of ourselves that creates, from the part that has to put on a little outfit and go be a person and tell other people about the things we create or want to create, so that we can make money and buy ingredients to cook the dinners that end up getting knocked on the floor. The world of online professional relationships is so fucking confusing, and writers are often so vulnerable. It is so important for artists of all kinds to guard the parts of ourselves that make the art.
If the sky is such a cliché / Why is it falling?
-Ana Božičević
Tweets:
. . . which I can no longer embed because El*n M*sk is insecure.
A reminder for all my cat-lovers
Anyway,
Stella says “have a good week.”
I adore this selection of quotes. They are making me feel so many feelings, big and small. Thank you!
“there are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times”
it is autumn in Australia. teething on vowel shifts... i often think of how the leaves move my bones in their falling:
"I suspect the world remembers everything—
time and bones and words flung together,
and me in it, suspecting. If we can believe
in photons—entities that possess movement
but not mass, and if the spirit, too
is made of light—then who am I to say
I haven’t lived before—or you,
and thus this tenderness?
Who am I to doubt that grace
is elemental like fire—or that souls
have no need of us, finally?"