February 2012
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“My flowers were promised rain but never received any, so I slit that cloud...”
– Bianca Stewart
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“I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of...”
– Monsterbeard
From Chinese activist Ai Weiwei’s heartbreaking piece in Newsweek.
I saved this quote a while back and keep thinking about it over and over. For all the frivolousness of my favorite sorts of writing, this clean bleakness is what sticks with me.
(via beenthinking)
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microspores:
Name of planet: unknown. Ship destroyed. No signs of life. Twin moons: one bone white, the other blood coloured.
Image source: Jo Ley
Soundtrack E.P. by Liam of sunshinemachine.org
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“A collective Palestinian statement
To apply for membership in the Syrian...”
– (click through for the signatories) Palestinian Intellectuals to Syrian Regime: Not in Our Name! (English trans) | wadistocracy واديقراطية
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Misty Saturday, Bianca Stewart
you are at home asleep not far from san francisco where summer
has unpacked & hugged everyone she will be a
thick girl spread wide over the city when i arrive in late
july
carrying a suitcase pocket change & dried mangoes
during a street fair alive with music we’ll become ten o’clock news kissing shamelessly over blueberry cotton candy before driving to a countryside motel where love...
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“Since how we all affect each other by the kind of feelings we display, it...”
– Rob Horning from Selflessness and self-absorption – The New Inquiry
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“The stories of America in the World rather than the World in America stubbornly...”
– from a piercing essay by Kamila Shamsie on American fiction and “the Other”. Guernica / The Storytellers of Empire
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Self-Portrait as a Butoh Dancer by Tory Adkisson
My feet patter—like rain, they stain each plot
of asphalt I clop over, shrieking like a kettle.
Peek behind the rice-cream make-up & break the illusion
if you must. Just don’t deny my right to dance with limbs stiff
as a petrified forest. (I paint my tongue with squid ink.)
I jerk & prance & take this ...
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You Live Because Insects Eat You, Tatsumi Hijikata
A person is buried in a wall. He becomes an insect that dances on a thin sheet of paper. it makes rustling noises, trying to hold falling particles. The insect then becomes a person, so fragile that he could crumble with the slightest touch, who is wandering around.
A dance in written form by Tatsumi Hijikata, who was the founder of Butoh. He believed that one of the strongest ways into the...
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Ear Walk, Tatsumi Hijikata
A big ear lies on the floor at the feet. Walk along the lines of this ear. Passing curves and slopes, walk into the depth of the ear. Suddenly, an eye grows on the tip of the index finger. The nose has also become an ear. Walk lazily along the walls of the ear. Slugs are crawling on the back. The ear traces the lines of its own self. Strange curves. Voice of vendors are heard from afar. Those were...
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Thought, Barefoot by Tory Adkisson
—from a fragment by Sappho
The night: there is a blue thread running from the sky’s nude seam. We watched as the azul drooled down
the broken lip of every fountain. The night before: you bruised your lip, cut
against the threshold of your own...
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“Do I live in order to write? Or do I write in order to live my life as I do?”
– Susan Mitchell, “Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding” (via invisiblestories)
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Months punctuated with you cascade from my wrists like playing cards.
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15 Love Songs You Probably Shouldn't Play On...
excessivelylongblogtitle:
Seems we’re approaching that time of year again. Valentines Day. The day where young teenaged couples pledge their undying love for one another only three weeks before breaking up and never speaking again. The day where florists and Hallmark card writers can finally take their families out for a night of expensive Chinese food. The day where professional misanthropes...
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To a Space, Suzanne Alaywan
my lungs’ butterfly for two lines of swallows my halo everything I have written without bustle I leave my images and cages with remains of your sanguineous wine I drug sick light I tame insomnia But birds waken me with insistent melodies On my cheeks the clown’s makeup the shoeblack in front of me with his hanging box a suitcase that does not travel and the piano who like...
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The Lyric Moment, Graham Hillard
Because the ground is wet still and the moon small, and because the wildfire smoke tells of summer, we place our shoes on the ground before stepping into the grass and remember a friend telling his students that the lyric moment must be created among them if they are to understand Rilke. Again and again, however we know the landscape of love, the deep scent of night,...
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“That’s what writing feels like to me. I keep fighting the urge to set myself on...”
– Scott McClanahan, from The Rumpus Interview with Scott McClanahan (via ahuntersheart)
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roadsidelions:
“Anyways I keep thinking I’m over wanting that approval and sometimes I feel hopeful but it’s late and attachment is so complicated. This is also the story of my privilege, Adrienne Rich talks about the same thing when she says, “we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special”. There may be ways in, there...
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hysteriarama:
I keep returning to male approval as something that infuriates me leaves me feeling helpless and crazy and abject and desperate because my feminism is always tainted and complicit. I feel traitorous all the time. I wonder if everyone else does too. I wonder how I’m supposed to reconcile my conflicting desires. This is a quote from my fifteen-year-old diary: “I want to write but not...
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“What I don’t understand, or rather, I do understand all too well, and don’t...”
– I’m very grateful for this essay by Kate Zambreno (via nightmarebrunette)
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“oil personified as a stingray-esque daemon sleeping beneath saudi arabia”
– radianthour
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Through a Glass Darkly, Traci Brimhall
You counted days by their cold silences. At night, wolves and men with bleeding hands
colonized your dreams. The last time I visited, you said you trapped a dead woman in your room
who told you to starve yourself to make room for God, so I let them give your body enough electricity
to calm it. Don’t be afraid. The future is not disguised as sleep. It...
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My psychiatrist often repeats back to me whole sentences I’ve said that he’s written down in my file. My file feels like a poem I’m writing in his hand. Do you remember when you said this? I do, I do remember. I have been telling the truth to you so hard. Mostly I remember all the words I left out of those sentences, to make the truth easier to tell.
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“it’s a painting
Of the burning of a book whose content is
Colors,...”
– Geoffrey G. O’Brien from the poem From Honey to Ashes