Happy Monday!
Today’s newsletter is a long one:
Housekeeping
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
Snag 5 books for $30
on my website. I will send u my darlings. U.S. only.
I have some art out this week.
I also have a teeny tiny poem out:
Quotations:
O stupid
O boy
O touch
O tentacle
O please not now
-Brendan Constantine
This body is A Body and also The Body.
-Nora McKinnon
Being seen is being safe. Being seen is being legible.
-Nora McKinnon
A body that hasn’t been seen isn’t a body yet. A body isn’t yet until seeing.
-Nora McKinnon
White smoke flowers up from the mouths
of bottom-heavy smokestacks. In West Virginia,
by god, I feel the boundary of dense green
woodland, willowy fingers on my gasping throat.
-Amy M. Alvarez, Appalachia
I’ve stumbled
upon another animal merely being
itself and still cuffing me to grace.
-Geffrey Davis, “West Virginia Nocturne”
Your loneliness is no pathology. How else to feel,
with the sky hung so close, the heavens peeled
raw? How else could you take the open sky, the dark
save for the cold, pockmarked moon gauzed in clouds,
the shards of northern lights?
-Jessica Tanck, “Ode to Wisconsin”
O the brilliance of a bonfire against
vast night. O the warmth of a garage, balm of lamplight
after the drive—salt-bleached tires, your hands
white-knuckling the wheel as your eyes comb shadows
for whitetails who wait to charge the chapel of a midnight road.
-Jessica Tanck, “Ode to Wisconsin”
at school / i am constantly looking for my image / i see a boy with coated nails & vaseline as lip gloss / we sit at the love garden to share our wounds
-Ugochukwu Damian Okpara, “Notes on Desire”
please promise me this will end / the sound of desire is so loud /
-Ugochukwu Damian Okpara, “Notes on Desire”
Oh that ardent belief
in the virginal,
the yes-but-not-yet
touched.
-Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, “Notes on the State of North Carolina”
& inside of us the bees kept dying despite everything
[…]
& tried to understand desire
[…]
& saying please
& saying please don’t leave me
-Leslie Harrison, “Parable of the maps”
Listen. The rug is wet because
I stood here. Because
it started pouring. Because
your door was open and I was
under a tree. Because
it was raining. Because the rain
and tree both
were in your backyard. Because
so was I. Because you
weren’t home. Because I knew
you were bowling. Because
I walk your road. Because your road
goes by your house. Because
I felt like a walk. Because
it was going to rain. Because your door
is never locked.
-Jill Osier, “Small Town”
Elation rises like blush at sunset, punch red leaking across sky, staining clouds churned meat pink.
-Brandon Andre Logans
Future, oh sweet future, is there a place for me in your retina?
-Brandon Andre Logans
I don’t know where I end because I am still in the sick of things. If I sand my body down into a shape, would I become more legible?
-Brandon Andre Logans
I have tried thinking about living, but light tells me my primary concern should be survival first.
-Brandon Andre Logans
I wonder if thriving and emotional stability might be a pubescent wet dream.
-Brandon Andre Logans
Time is a construct, like all things, even power, so be assured someday you will persevere and thrive.
-Brandon Andre Logans
those shadows of clouds in summer
slowly darkening the asphalt before
the rain darkens it more
-Aaron McCollough
I know so
Little concretely
Except sidewalk.
-Adam Strauss
a white writer said
i was lucky to have all this culture to write about
i was a performance piece to him
i was art
-Anthony Fangary
I want to speak
but my body must forage
& feel another skin before it charts
the unkempt sprawl
to be transfigured
-Ben Meyerson
all we hear are hours and days
tickling our nostrils like ragweed
at the tangled border of an endless fi eld
compressing pollen to wax in our ears –
and then some chatter from underwater
from the bedded stones and the pine droppings
some mute chorus
scraping us into light.
-Ben Meyerson
Tweets:
That’s all I have for you 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