Latest Posts by b-luish - Page 3

Sylvia Plath, "Love Letter"

i imagine the butches’ stripper bar by Jill McDonough

may to december by Megan Fernandes

sneaking onto the reservoir again by Robert Wood Lynn

A conversation w/ a snared fox at the edge of the field

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

C.S. Lewis

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

OBIT [My mother’s teeth] by Victoria Chang

One of my greatest inspirations as a writer is the late great LA Times food reviewer Jonathan Gold. I legitimately think he should be considered one of the best writers of the last 100 years. Look at this.

Poetry. Non-fiction par excellence. This is a man who not only understood the visceral, the sensory, the sublime, but he could put it into words.

Look at you, Wiping your own tears With the same hands That long to be held

Ayesha Zahra

“Note to self: You’ve gotta do this for you. This is for you. This isn’t about anybody. Live for you. Honour you. Never lose sight of that.”

— Unknown

this made me cry so now i need everyone to see it

it’s kinda fucked up that you’re only an age for a year. I didn’t know how to be 23 yet, let me try again

A conversation w/ a snared fox at the edge of the field

hey man I found a piece of your soul stuck in the text messages of old friends you don’t speak to anymore. do you want it back

"if trauma can be inherited from one generation to the next, then so can love, resilience, and wisdom"

to be perfectly honest i think that ghosts being transluscent and faded is kind of antithetical to what they represent. they're an echo that cannot move on, cannot fade out - they should be oversaturated and stiff and strangely out of place and unchanging, like something preserved in clear glass.

Leila Chatti, "Postcard from Gone"

I want to tell a story to the artists and would-be artists out there.

When I was 19, I made a large oil painting of the nerd I would eventually marry. I poured all my attention and care into this painting. It's the only art I have from back then that still holds up as a work I'm proud of today.

I entered it into a judged show at the local art center. It got an honorable mention. I went to see the show with my beloved model. One of the judges came up to talk to me, and highlighted that all the judges really liked the painting. It would have placed, except, you see, the feet were incorrect. They were too wide and short, and if I just studied a bit more anatomy-

I called over my future wife, and asked her to take off her shoe. Being already very used to humoring me, she did. The judge looked at her very short, very wide little foot. Exactly as I'd lovingly rendered it. I would never edit her appearance in any way.

The judge looked me in the eye, and to his credit, he really looked like he meant it when he said "Oh I'm so sorry."

Anyways the moral of the story is that all of those anatomy books that teach you proportions are either showing you averages, or a very specific idea of an idealized body. Actual bodies are much more varied than that.

So don't forget to draw from observation, and remember that humans aren't mass produced mannequins. Delight in our variation. Because it's supposed to be there.

favorite tweets

What if we were two touching stars in Minecraft.... and our creators made sure that we would stay together even when fate tries to tear us apart.........

i looooveeeee your breakfast posting. it inspires me to put more love and care into what i eat, especially breakfast which is really the best meal of the day 🙂‍↕️

cook for yourself the way you would cook for someone you love

“You can run, run, run away from a lot of things in life, but you can’t run away from yourself. And the key to happiness is to understand and accept who you are.”

— Dale Archer

"Beautiful Losers", Leonard Cohen

after the fire by Ada Limón

"All Texts", Viggo Mortensen

“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

she was so fucking real for this #transitionNOW

A Conversation with Richard Siken by Thomas Hobohm