round-up: 7/3
quotations, tweets, call to action, etc.
Happy Sunday, folks!
Here’s what I have for you today (it’s a long one!):
Housekeeping
Quotations
Call to action
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I have a lil poem out in Faultline!
My new hobby is making necklaces & I’m having a great time.
The New York Times has been ……………….. very TERF-y lately.
Anyways.
& to summarize recent political news:
Quotations:
Our father said, Never find yourself
alone with danger, meaning men.
-Tennessee Hill
i will climb onto the moon, look back at the ravaged
world, reach my hand out to you, & say come with me. please.
-Alfredo Aguilar
if there is an after world / i am certain we will waste that one too.
-Alfredo Aguilar
And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn’t hunger
but something like fear.
-Cecilia Woloch
As a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.
-Cecilia Woloch
Oh, God, how beautiful we all are.
-Kirsten Thorup
The night was animal, was owlmaw
& preyclaw. Half-wild, I shrank
from its grasping, the moon scything
through fir limbs.
-Claire Hero
The moment of change is the only poem.
To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.
The word queer has gone through many transformations since it emerged in the 16th century. Originally, it meant “strange,” or “peculiar”: associated meanings included a feeling of unwellness or something suspicious. By the time Sherlock Holmes published the story “The Adventure of the Second Stain” in 1904—in which Inspector Lestrade threatens that a misbehaving constable will “find [himself] in Queer Street,” a euphemism for losing his job—the term “queer” had become a derogatory term for men in same-sex relationships. By that time, the term “invert,” coined by English poet and author Radclyffe Hall, had replaced “queer,” and, later, “homophile.” By the end of the 1960s, “gay” had become the umbrella terms for those in same-sex partnerships. The term “queer” had begun to be reclaimed by the late 1980s from its pejorative use to a positive self-identifier by LGBT people.
-Virginia Konchan
My body has never been my body.
It has been a bucket of asphalt
upside down in the puerile wind.
-Virginia Konchan
We will do the unspeakable to our perfect bodies.
-Adrian Sobol
I’ll be the body you never imagined drowning in.
-Adrian Sobol
Someone told me once that we are all cadavers,
or was it flowers
that have yet to bloom.
-Anthony Borruso
I ask dad why
I can’t have candy. Why that boy
is brown. Why grass shivers in the wind,
why the wind moves but is bodiless.
-Anthony Borruso
The business of being
in a body is so tiresome.
-Anthony Borruso
What faith do you consider yourself to be?
I have no faith in anything but the coyote’s howl.
-Anthony Borruso
To have two mouths, one for singing
and one for screaming bloody murder—
this is what the poet strives for.
-Anthony Borruso
Wanting to become parables, we released
ourselves like crows into moonlight.
What did we hope for?
The hagiographer’s headlamp.
What did we expect?
Parable’s ineffable return.
-Gregory Trent Hill Jr.
How delicate
the bones in her wrist—how easily
she splinters.
-Elizabeth Kicak
All I want to do is write
about frantic shadows.
-Elizabeth Kicak
I breathe the lake
closed-mouthed through my nostrils,
fill both lungs.
-Jared Calvin White
I’m not versed in these verses,
their grist and tumble.
-Grace Arenas
To stay reckless as seaweed, feigning
tooth or tentacle.
-Grace Arenas
I have nothing to do with explosions.
-Sylvia Plath
He is trying
to learn how to unbecome
nothing, something close
to nothing.
-Patrick Kindig
Mornings:
color. In summer: a litany
of nipples, pectorals, brown
skin lifting like a prayer.
-Patrick Kindig
I move my body through surf & imagine foam teeth
dissolve me—
this, my most precious spell. Death is a blue burglar
but I am vigilant.
I address the monster inside me, which is animal
& male.
-John Allen Taylor
May the surf unthread you from me.
-John Allen Taylor
How well you worship & despair—
-John Allen Taylor
The air thick & humid
settles like moss at your throat—
-John Allen Taylor
once upon a time before the invention of memory no one suffered
-Laura Villareal
once upon a time i decided love was too much like drowning made myself an island where if i scream out the ocean swallows entire cities until i see my suffering is small enough to cradle
-Laura Villareal
we both mistake solitude for safety find comfort in wishing ourselves untouchable you a cloud & i fog
-Laura Villareal
like a small animal you are lost in the unraveled landscape of sleep
-Laura Villareal
i summon the soft texture of love from absence’s mouth leaning into the sickle moon’s quiet body your warm breath close before i fall away from you into my own unknowable place
-Laura Villareal
i want my body to churn rot into blossom
-Laura Villareal
you look at me like i’m deserving of real care & devotion, the kind i’ve given but never seen up close until you i didn’t know how to hold a miracle
-Laura Villareal
fear of loss worries at the hem of my heart
-Laura Villareal
Call to action:
As you may remember, I decided to start including calls to action in this newsletter several weeks ago. You can view past calls here and here.
Here’s today’s:
Share a recent line or poem that’s stuck with you via social media. It could be on your Instagram story, on Twitter, on Facebook, or even a photo uploaded to Pinterest (lol).
As I have said—and say, often—there’s value in tracking your influences & the writers whose work you love. It also is good to participate in the broader writing community.
In case you want to hear me gab about this stuff more in-depth, you can check out these past posts:
Tweets:
That’s all for today.
Stay safe out there!
Love this! Thank you!