if the girl were a fish

Not your birthday poem

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 07:50:26 -0400

Not your birthday poem
I want to write you a poem for your birthday but I have to wait until I’m feeling softer and less hungry and I can tell you that you’re like a garden or the right hand of a piano melody
Today I can only tell you that you taste like a mouthful of river water, and that you feel like the scraped knee I got from the rocky bottom
Your birthday poem will be about the baby birds you nursed all night until you were aching with love and exhaustion
But this poem is about what our friend said when we found the hatchlings half dead in the chimney
That her parents taught her that in the world there was good, there was evil, and there was wild
If I would love you then I would love you wild
Frenzied
Thighs trembling and slick with black oil, with black ink
Love down to your marrow

Some days you feel like something stuck in my teeth (you love to write about teeth)
And I hate that I can smell when you’ve been in a room
A shiver an ache but an ache not in my head but my stomach like hunger: I’m only myself when I’m wanting
Everything they write about you is also about me and also about you
I get nasty when you insist on being soft I can see that you aren’t all soft that’s for your birthday poem
I don’t want to be holy I don’t want to be tender unless it’s tender like the flesh that you sink your wolf teeth into
For your birthday poem maybe I will file those canines down but in this poem I want a bloody lip

A dream I have not had but would like to:
You a princess with a blighted heart and me your gladiator
Sent into the ring to fight your demons in mismatched combat
I’ve never felt more alive than when they’re snarling and circling and I’m bracing myself for the first strike, spear and shield ready
Except for maybe I’ll feel more alive when you dance into the ring kicking up dust
Cut through the numb silence of the spectating crowd
And hold me covered in sweat and iron and demon blood
And kiss me electric home again

—thanksgiving

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 06:55:14 -0400

doraspenlow:

—thanksgiving

death has been on my mind lately. a few years back i would have thought it foolish, almost arrogant,…

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 12:22:44 -0400

bvtterflybaby:

“Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before.’”

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

death has been on my mind lately. a few years back i would have thought it foolish, almost arrogant, to be scared of death, to be so certain of a feeling towards an event as uncertain as such. here was my thought process: no one dies and lives to tell, so to be afraid is to claim knowledge of the after, to say hey i am afraid because i know what happens next will be worse than living.

but lately i often find my thoughts drifting into ectopic discourses on death. fitting perhaps amidst a pandemic, more plaintively the sudden loss of naya. but the fear is not of death itself, rather the immense loneliness that, i presumed, would saturate the consciousness as the body yields, and the involuntary acceptance that ultimately no one can hold your hand through it.

yet the possibility for familiarity has never crossed my mind, so the set was not complete and the math was wrong. the proposition that i would sink into a cosmic loneliness is as likely to be true as that i would return to an ecstatic familiarity - to not consider either is perhaps even preposterous. so maybe when i die, the first thing i’ll say is i know this feeling. i was here before.

My Grandma Asked Me A Riddle

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 01:32:56 -0400

ET TU, BRUTE?

my grandma asked me a riddle as we fell through the cracks in the ceiling that her daughter
and the man she married
made
and
she asked me another
as they
pulverized us to the ground
with a letter opener
and magnanimous marinade of bloody brine
from their tongueless mouths
of pious severance
as we oozed from between their knuckles
into pâtés of tū quoque
and they
licked us from the floor with unbridled mastication.

- hongyu (june 8, 2020)

"for Aunt Margaret my aunts type amen into comment sections because they have seen God work through..."

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 13:27:42 -0400

“

for Aunt Margaret
my aunts type amen into comment sections
because they have seen God work through even smaller gestures

whole kingdoms planted in their backyards

who knew a squash could say
I love you

an ocean’s floor of water will not save her husband’s
favorite tomatoes when she picks them she tries not to think of his heart

they got their gardens
and a tree has never called them nigger

”

- Tyree Daye, Green Thumbed (via Wildness)

“The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1814), Katsushika...

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 22:58:33 -0400

“The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1814), Katsushika Hokusai

Mother’s milk

when i was younger i didn’t breast feed from a woman who said i was left in the womb for too long,
and came out half-dead because
her salpinges gripped my torso from within and her giant shell of a uterus clamed around
my neck
as the absent aptychus
to choke a shape out of my formless torso.

for the rest of my life she forces her giant nipple into my mouth
as hot milk throbbed my oesophagus and stretched it so long i become the third fallopian.
a diver and two octopi –
i wore white to ward off the sharks
but the milk was whiter and i cut open my breast and the milk foams cruelly then crushes the windpipe.

but tentacles are best dipped in soy sauce so i tore out her limbs
while the siphuncle sucked the milk out of my lungs to keep me
neutrally buoyant
until impishly they collapsed inwards and the eternal colostrum gushed
out my nostrils,
my sockets,
and the tympanic membranes accreted to sulfomycin
till the auricle collapsed under the octopus’s aria
and in the battle with the nautiloid
i am the skeleton of Clubin that my mother voids.

“Je dédie ce livre au rocher d'hospitalité et de liberté, à ce coin de vieille terre normande où vit le noble petit peuple de la mer, à l'île de Guernesey, sévère et douce, mon asile actuel, mon tombeau probable.”
(I dedicate this book to the rock of hospitality and liberty, to that portion of old Norman ground inhabited by the noble little nation of the sea, to the island of Guernsey, severe yet kind, my present asylum, my probable tomb.)
- Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866)

- hongyu (june 5, 2020)