December 2011
90 posts
“You are born of sex. Your every body cell is a sex cell, all your energy is sex energy. So if religions teach that sex is bad, sex is sin, they have condemned you completely. And not only have they condemned you, now you will condemn yourself. Now you cannot go beyond it and you cannot leave it, and now it is a sin. You are divided; you start fighting with yourself. And the more this guilt can be...
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Maggie Nelson, "Something Bright, Then Holes"
I used to do this, the self I was used to do this the selves I no longer am nor understand. Something bright, then holes is how a girl, newly-sighted, once described a hand. I reread your letters, and remember correctly: you wanted to eat through me. Then fall asleep with your tongue against an organ, quiet enough to hear it kick. Learn everything there is to know about loving someone then walk...
“Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me: the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so. And much of this I fancy you yourself have felt: much also remains for you to feel. There is an unknown land full of strange flowers...
Olga Broumas, from "Little Red Riding Hood"
“I kept to the road, kept the hood secret, kept what it sheathed more secret still. I opened it only at night, and with other women who might be walking the same road to their own grandma’s house, each with her basket of gifts.”
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Marge Piercy, "Always Unsuitable"
She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck. They were grinning politely and evenly at me. Unsuitable they smirked. It is true I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts too big for the silhouette. She knew at once that we had sex, lots of it as if I had strolled into her diningroom in a dirty negligee smelling gamy smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry on my neck. I could never charm the...
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For Each of You
experimentaltimeorder:
Do not let your head deny your hands any memory of what passes through them nor your eyes nor your heart everything can be useful except what is wasteful (you will need to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)
- - Audre Lorde, From a Land Where Other People Live
distantstations:
Leonard Cohen - “The Future”
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Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood
“What I could not foresee was the flame that would be locked inside me, whose cinders would continue to glow for years to come, to burn in my heart. How strange it is when something that we have desired so many actually happens. When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to...
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke (via frenchtwist)
“who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and...”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (via silentfrenzies)
“The family is a court of justice which never shuts down for night or day.”
– Malcolm De Chazal
(via devilduck)
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“An average man is too concerned with liking people or with being liked himself....”
– Carlos Castaneda ~ A Separate Reality (via journalofanobody)
“Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
– David Mitchell (via pavorst)
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“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a...”
– R. Buckminster Fuller (via app1ejuice)
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“Heart, do not stain my skin
With bruises; go about
Your simple function. Mind,...”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Theme and Variations, 2”
(via reticence-)
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Maenad W. S. Di Piero —Roman copy of Greek original of late fifth century b.c. Before she rolls and stands, sheets eddied in oyster shell ridges so sharp around the deep thighs and bent knee I could cut myself on them, her head on the pillow bends to study what she’s become. I look down at her and see antiquity, a supplicant’s chiton pleats wilting from the torso, the slouching god inside her...
“In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it.”
– Yukio Mishima, from Spring Snow (via emptythreats)
“I’m under water, and it’s dark and clear.”
– Kjersti A. Skomsvold, from The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am (via the-final-sentence)
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Keetje Kulpers, "Across A Great Wilderness Without...
The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I’m drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them— language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, each bullet hole suffused with moon, like the platinum thread beyond them where the river runs the length of...
“I promise to make you so alive that the fall of dust on furniture will deafen…”
– Nina Cassian (via human-voices)
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Sun City Girls, “The Shining Path”
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Ghazal: what love takes by Juliet P. Howard
I’m sleeping as I write this; you’re standing over me crying while Ella belts out: No, no they can’t take that away from me
If this is all I can get, your hand on my shoulder in the dream, lips warm against my neck, I’ll take that
The alarm clock becomes enemy; I press snooze every few minutes, search for you and finally press stop when I can’t take it any more
Please don’t mistake this...
“I tried not to do anything in life
that ashamed the child I was”
– José Saramago (via human-voices)
“I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with...”
– Joan Didion
(via mythologyofblue)
“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the...”
– Donna Tartt, from The Secret History (foxandfayvel via glitterdeers)
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Tess Gallagher, “Instructions to the Double”
So now it’s your turn, little mother of silences, little father of half-belief. Take up this face, these daily rounds with a cabbage under each arm convincing the multitudes that a well-made-anything could save them. Take up most of all, these hands trained to an ornate piano in a house on the other side of the country.
I’m staying here without music, without applause. I’m not going...
“Scars like small road maps
to the wrong ways I traveled
to be in your arms.”
– Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson (via tylerknott)
“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place...”
– Lawrence Durrell + (via mythologyofblue)
“You could strip all the romance from a place if you were determined enough, even...”
– Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (via silentfrenzies)
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Keetje Kuipers, "4th of July"
If I have any romantic notions left, please let me abandon them here on the dashboard of your Subaru beside this container of gas station potato salad and bottle of sunscreen. Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet waiting to be shaken open by some other man’s hand. Let there be another town after this one, a town with an improbable Western name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get a room...
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Heather Aimee O'Neill, "Mars May Have Been a Land...
Let’s begin by deciding what it is we’re trying to define. You’re impossible. That’s what I’ve decided, that’s how I’ve defined you. Nature has a way of compensating. As a blonde, I should have 38,000 more strands of hair on my head than my brunette sister, my redhead brother. You found one on your pillow and, hours after I left, called to see if I wanted it back. An eyelash, you would...
“Like a ripple
that chases the slightest caress
of the breeze—
is that how you...”
– Ono no Komachi (transl. Jane Hirshfield) (via pleasebebrave)
