on poetry & being human

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round-up: 6/10
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round-up: 6/10

quotations, tweets, recommendations, etc.

Despy Boutris
Jun 10
Share this post
round-up: 6/10
despyboutris.substack.com

Happy Friday!

Here’s what I have for you today:

  • Housekeeping

  • What I’m reading

  • Quotations

  • Tweets


Housekeeping:

Cute lil thread happening on Twitter today:

Twitter avatar for @itsdboutsDespy Boutris @itsdbouts
hi. what were your first three publications in lit journals? trying to compile a list of places that are open to (very) emerging writers. ❤️

June 10th 2022

42 Retweets365 Likes

I have too many books. Please buy some.

shop


What I’m reading:

  • I found this poem’s premise to be very interesting

  • I quite enjoyed this poem

  • I love fire poems!


Quotations:

It’s hard to live when you know / the daggers are coming / It’s hard to live / sometimes / at all

-Devin Kelly, “Outside the Window the Whole World is Humming”


the action of his hand extending across the evening’s dark,

its taking hold of the shoulder of a man

sitting before a whimpering fire of reed.

-Charlie Clark, “Devil’s Nostalgia”


Body rendered still; empty as kindling, dry as gravel.

Not gravel, stone. Not stone, shadow.

-Chuck Carlise


If by body we mean a record of events, a past growing

& reforming around fault lines & notches of bone.

-Chuck Carlise


An old love / took the picture. He killed himself later. Hunting rifle, I think.

-Emily Nason, “Sertraline”


Doesn’t it hurt / to be human. I’m so human I could die.

-Emily Pittinos, “I Grow Less Visible”


How we, wild, taste horn and hide—give ourselves / up to longing.

-Clare Paniccia, “Self Portrait as Bison Struck by Lightning”


Sometimes a girl doesn’t need a reason to place / a foxglove blossom on her tongue.

-Kathryn Smith, “Self Portrait with Cephalopod and Digitalis Purpurea”


Sometimes a girl doesn’t need a reason to want

to disappear behind the unseen framework

of collarbones.

-Kathryn Smith, “Self Portrait with Cephalopod and Digitalis Purpurea”


Have you ever wondered

what’s beneath the skin, working? I know

so little, I wouldn’t recognize my own heart if I saw it

outside my body. I wouldn’t know my own bones

arranged in an ocean bed, an octopus coaxing

them to root in the sea floor until their stalks

grew thick with mouthlike blooms.

-Kathryn Smith, “Self Portrait with Cephalopod and Digitalis Purpurea”


This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a joint in the trashcan.

-RJ Equality, “Burning Down the House”


She is a rocky shore of smooth, fist-sized stones where salt licks the land. Or is she fire instead, lit from within, me staring dumbstruck at the low glow.

-Erin Bertram


When I say I get wet for her, I mean holistically.

The palms, the under-arms.

Of course, the mouth.

Sometimes, even, the eyes.

-Erin Bertram


Beauty is, at its core, consolation, writes Sontag. And isn’t that true, isn’t that how we want the story to go. Imagine saying the sky is merely interesting. Watch it burn off its color. Feel the air drain down.

-Erin Bertram


Dark thing,

make a myth of yourself:

all women turn into lilacs.

-Jennifer Chang, “This Corner of the Western World”


Silence

rides the back of your throat,

his tongue, your name.

-Jennifer Chang, “This Corner of the Western World”


My grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language.

-Forrest Gander, “Beckoned”


It doesn’t need to be / your fault for it to break you.

-Forrest Gander, “Beckoned”


On her chair, Mom would sag like a melting
                                                  candle—unlit. Bogarting

those Pall Malls that turned our curtains
                                                  to coffee

filters. Turned my sister and me into mourning
                                                  coughers. The moths

living rent-free along the lace died from the smoke.

-Alejandro Lucero (what a lesson in language! oof!)


The waitress’s charm bracelet

trickles onto imitation sunflowers,

talismans dust syrup.

-Jon Riccio


I think you might be a planet of grief. A whole solar system of regret.

-Matthew Minicucci


the sound of my own desire keeps

me awake at night, keeps me tossing four-feet

above the sheets

-Suzanne Richardson


Nothing ever crawls out but my hunger.

-Cameron Finch


in grief’s dumbstruck language

we speak only of shadow

-Patty Paine


Hammock. Red. It held us we held on I used my legs and later you knelt down. Hand. Inner knee. Shoulder tattoo. Tattoo where your heart stampedes.

-Rebecca Lindenberg


There are only a few things I’m not proud of: knuckle tattoos and the nights you smelled like matrimony. In my bed, you slept in sweat, and I paced in the kitchen, practicing long division. If you weren’t the spit in my shower drain or the crack in stucco that once fit my finger, I could have loved you until you were anxious. But you’re still a Sagittarius, and I’m still in Michigan mourning over dead skin, falling in love with the sound of my own voice making excuses.

-Sarah Dalton


When my dad began dying […] no pebble,

no ocean, no altar, could coop my grief.

-Dante Di Stephano


Soft skin behind the knees, slick. A girl
lost in the South, mouth
sharp and clipped around the vowels. This is

what it means to be lucky:
When you go missing and they call the police
everyone claps at your return. Hands like pigeons,
welcoming you home.

-Alysia Sawchyn


I’m sorry
for the way your body learned
of hunger, of emptiness, of
cavernous quiet.

-Elizabeth Hickson


I thought that maybe I was a rind with no fruit.

-Brandon Andre Logans


Maybe I could lie down and try to tie myself back to my bones.

-Brandon Andre Logans


My body [is] full of unbearable noise.

-Sheila Dong


How to return / to this: the side stretch of memory

-Milla van der Have


My love asks again

what do you need, as if to say I can just keep

needing.

-Fox Rinne


Sometimes I believe I am only a boy / when beautiful.

-Fox Rinne


There

you are, aflight under the open

wingspan of my fingers, how I hover,

how I harvest, how I

take as much as I can hold.

-Fox Rinne


It was the way summer hunted me.

-Erika L. Sanchez


How do I explain the hatred of the sun,

the terrible wonder of being alive?

-Erika L. Sanchez


How / a beloved becomes a stranger / and a stranger becomes a beloved.

-Erika L. Sanchez


Tweets:

Twitter avatar for @itsdboutsDespy Boutris @itsdbouts
i love it when a journal lists their fav poets for reference & the first one's ezra pound. gotta put the fascist first to let readers kno what ur abt. god forbid naming a non-fascist imagist

June 8th 2022

10 Likes
Twitter avatar for @itsdboutsDespy Boutris @itsdbouts
some journals r like "name ur file LastName_FirstName_BlahBlah" like bro i'm literally not going to do that. i'm gonna keep my file name as dfgjkldlgjd.docx i literally do not have the time 4 this

Despy Boutris @itsdbouts

ik it's important to follow submission guidelines. but consider this: what if those guidelines are stupid

June 8th 2022

8 Likes
Twitter avatar for @DegenerateThingLapis @DegenerateThing
It's wild to me that newspapers back in the '50's commented on trans issues more responsibly than 90% of stuff today
Daily News Newspaper headline: Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operation Transform Bronx Youth

June 10th 2022

3,310 Retweets26,361 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lostblackboyLil Uzi Hurt 🥺 @lostblackboy
Today I interviewed an LGBT elder activist. I asked her how she felt about Pride month and she said, “It’s weird. Whenever I go to the Parade, I notice how few gay man in their 50s-70s are there. We lost so much of that generation and I feel that void every day.”

June 9th 2022

15,992 Retweets183,786 Likes
Twitter avatar for @BraddrofliTBrad @BraddrofliT
The bullet was invented in 1847. Second amendment is from 1789. So the second amendment only applies to muskets and only muskets.

June 9th 2022

12,983 Retweets73,900 Likes
Twitter avatar for @CodeineFridgeT 🎯 @CodeineFridge
plants really be like “i do not vibe wit dis dirt” and die

June 9th 2022

24,361 Retweets224,211 Likes
Twitter avatar for @Bhytes1Brooke Lynn Hytes @Bhytes1
Well…
Image

June 9th 2022

9,882 Retweets129,581 Likes
Twitter avatar for @losverwebsted • 21 @losverwebs
she spilled idk… like you can’t sit there and tell me she was wrong
Image

June 9th 2022

13,949 Retweets141,383 Likes
Twitter avatar for @missmaliceSnPMiss Malice 🦇 @missmaliceSnP
the Trevor Project receives millions of dollars from corporate partners & I just realllllyyyy think they don’t need a donation from your drag show/book/small community project!!! Consider mutual aid funds & orgs that don’t get that kind of corporate attention!

June 8th 2022

3,904 Retweets19,372 Likes
Twitter avatar for @HormonalJewtrans trender @HormonalJew
poking the bear here but the biggest tell that cisgender bisexual people in opposite-sex relationships often lack the range to take up the kind of space they do is that they can’t just sit with or ignore the possibility of feeling unwelcome.

June 7th 2022

106 Retweets1,393 Likes
Twitter avatar for @HormonalJewtrans trender @HormonalJew
most queer people and pretty much all trans people have learned to develop their own strategies for dealing with the perception of public disapproval. this is something you need if you are visibly or recognizably an outsider. perpetual insiders do not often cultivate this skill.

June 7th 2022

55 Retweets803 Likes
Twitter avatar for @mattxivmatt @mattxiv
finally gay news that is not bad: rebel wilson is one of us y’all
Image

June 9th 2022

3,507 Retweets71,251 Likes
Twitter avatar for @mattxivmatt @mattxiv
postmates WHAT IS THIS?
Image

June 9th 2022

1,338 Retweets26,813 Likes
Twitter avatar for @boygrrIfemboj zizek @boygrrI
i really think lumping the current attacks on trans people as "LGBT issues" extremely overlooks how specific this hate is, and acts as a convenient excuse for moderate dems to not address trans rights directly

June 8th 2022

812 Retweets6,712 Likes
Twitter avatar for @clapifyoulikemeMrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. @clapifyoulikeme
If I did a tweet so bad it forced Alison Bechdel to add a corollary to the Bechdel test, I think I would probably delete my account and maybe cry?

Alison Bechdel @AlisonBechdel

Okay, I just added a corollary to the Bechdel test: Two men talking to each other about the female protagonist of an Alice Munro story in a screenplay structured on a Jane Austen novel = pass. #FireIsland #BechdelTest

June 8th 2022

594 Retweets5,420 Likes
Twitter avatar for @joshctadlockJosh Tadlock, MD @joshctadlock
Had my first invited lecture today, a notable milestone in my academic career. It was my distinct honor to discuss the complex connection of the hip bone to the thigh bone with my son’s Montessori School today. #orthotwitter #MedTwitter
Image

June 7th 2022

1,067 Retweets42,647 Likes
Twitter avatar for @the_transit_guyHayden Clarkin @the_transit_guy
My politics is whatever this is
Image

June 7th 2022

12,818 Retweets109,906 Likes
Twitter avatar for @WarrenIsDeadmichael lutz @WarrenIsDead
very funny to see a thread from a scholar of religion telling me not to mock "Disney adults" because these are people finding religious meaning and it's like no i get that it's actually WHY i am making fun of them

June 7th 2022

4,427 Retweets59,009 Likes

That’s all for today.

As always, I hope you’ll consider buying some books or art or zines or giving me attention on Instagram. No pressure, though.

See you soon—

-Despy Boutris

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