round-up: 6/10
quotations, tweets, recommendations, etc.
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:
I have too many books. Please buy some.
What I’m reading:
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.
When I say I get wet for her, I mean holistically.
The palms, the under-arms.
Of course, the mouth.
Sometimes, even, the eyes.
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.
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. Bogartingthose Pall Malls that turned our curtains
to coffeefilters. Turned my sister and me into mourning
coughers. The mothsliving 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.
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
Nothing ever crawls out but my hunger.
in grief’s dumbstruck language
we speak only of shadow
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.
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.
When my dad began dying […] no pebble,
no ocean, no altar, could coop my grief.
Soft skin behind the knees, slick. A girl
lost in the South, mouth
sharp and clipped around the vowels. This iswhat 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.
I’m sorry
for the way your body learned
of hunger, of emptiness, of
cavernous quiet.
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:
Despy Boutris @itsdbouts
ik it's important to follow submission guidelines. but consider this: what if those guidelines are stupid
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
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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