“tell me a story. i don’t have any to tell. (you wouldn’t believe me if i did.) you always have stories. you already know all the good ones. (the only good ones i have are the ones with you.) then tell me an old one. but you already know how it ends. (i wish i could forget how this one ends. i think i was happier not knowing.) i don’t care. it’s no fun if you know the ending. (you should care. this tragedy is a fairytale without it.) can’t you make one up? i just want to hear a story. fine. i’ll tell you a story. (i’ll tell you a lie. that’s all i have left to give you.) okay. i’m listening. once upon a time, there was a boy with fool’s gold for hair. (and i couldn’t save him.)”
— but I swear I tried. I did. ( j.p. ) || insp. by @noxalnoesis
It touches me that this touched something in you
Normal is a memory, but time moves so slow, so much like it always has, that no one notices.
No one notices that we don't talk about jam anymore, or how beautiful your dress is.
Because have you seen the news? There are war crimes, beloved.
Your dress? The price of weeks of food thirty years ago
And it tastes like small hands working sowing machines.
The jam? No one has time for home mades anymore, my dear. There are tears to be swallowed.
I wonder if there ever was a normalcy, with Sunday brunches and sadness, not depression. Or if it was always a memory.
Always just a few generations out of our reach.
See, I was wrong.
We do notice.
Oh my god I'm listening to California Dreamin' with headphones and. Did you know it's one of those songs that are hardcore spliced up between headphones. Like the female and male voices are mostly coming from seperate headphones.
This makes no difference except for a cool listening experience unless. Unless you take one headphone out.
Ohhh, there's still the faintest echo of the female voices in the male voices' headphone, but half the instruments are missing. It's haunting. It's majestic. It's Denny in a old rehearsal room. It's not really a designated space, it's the backroom of their bar. They jokingly used to call it the backstage area. It's wooden panels that were never glossy. It's Michelle and Cass on old stools with cheap cider. It's Denny alone. It's Denny's guitar, with John's handwriting on its side. It's an empty room that's not used to being empty. You know when rooms sound the most loud when there's supposed to be a hundred sounds and you know every one of them? You think you can hear it out of pure fate.
He can only play as many instruments as his hands can hold. But he plays them as well as ever. There's no tremble in his fingers. He can definitely hear Cass. He can almost see John. When he closes his eyes, he can believe they're through the door, in the bar. Hearing him play. Singing back to him.
California dreaming. On such a winter's day
Hen and Chicks by Yamaguchi Okatomo, mid- to late 18th century
Masterpieces of Japan on Twitter: Source
Carved this small gallery after filling the shell with resin first, to try and make smaller windows (so it won't break).
it is november, and yesterday it felt like it was supposed to be snowing. in boston, november used a winter month, not a fall month. it is supposed to be chilly; rarely capping over 45F. it is a sweater-and-jacket month. it is a "maybe a scarf too" month. in my childhood, november meant blizzards and sleet.
it did not snow. tomorrow the weather predicts a high of 76.
i have spent so many years of my life studying the longterm possibilities of climate change - the culmination of capitalism wreaking havoc on the bodies of people, animals, plants - but every so often i am still shocked by something small and personal.
in a hundred years, when someone goes outside in boston - will they know the feeling of "snow in the air"?
i know it's a learned feeling, a sensation that maybe only longterm experience can teach. a few years ago, i was walking with my friend who had just moved up from the south. i said it smells like snow and she gave me this look like - what the fuck. i said it feels like snow too, which didn't help. she looked up to the bright blue sky and then back at me and then back at the sky. 12 hours later, we had 3 inches. you can just tell if it's going to snow.
except i can't tell, anymore. i stand outside in a tee shirt and watch my dog dance around a lake. we're in a drought and the skin of the water has peeled back twenty meters. the lake is tamed, quiet, puddlelike and sour. my pokemon go app warns there's a weather condition in my area.
my dog gets too hot from running and sits in the water and i want to laugh about his long frame and how awkwardly he sits - and i can't. some simian part of my brain is scratching the walls. it was supposed to snow. it was supposed to snow, but now it's warm instead.
during the last full solar eclipse, the dogs and the birds and the crickets went crazy under utter darkness. we laughed at them then, promising it will all be okay in a moment. but some part of me is still locked in that long night: some animal sensation.
something is wrong, my body says. i can't afford eggs or rent. i go outside to watch a sunset and listen to birdsong. i don't bring a jacket. allergies are killing me this season, allergies i didn't have as a kid. everyone comments that halloween has started to feel strange, offkilter. that it's hard having "holiday cheer." my body thinks it's april, and then it thinks we're in september, and then june.
something is terribly wrong, she whispers. go outside. it is supposed to be snowing.
WE SHALL BE MONSTERS
Saptajit Banerjee What does it mean to be human? // 스위트홈 Sweet Home (2020-2024) dir. Jang Young-woo; Lee Eung-bok; Park So-hyun // Victoria Schwab Vicious // Melissa Broder Problem Area from "Last Sext" // Clarice Lispector The Hour of the Star // 스위트홈 Sweet Home (2020-2024) dir. Jang Young-woo; Lee Eung-bok; Park So-hyun // Ocean Vuong On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous // George Seferis Collected Poems 1924-1955 // 스위트 홈 Sweet Home (2017-2020) cr. Kim Carnby & Hwang Young-chan // Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov // Frank Bidart Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 // Florence + the Machine Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) // 스위트홈 Sweet Home (2020-2024) dir. Jang Young-woo; Lee Eung-bok; Park So-hyun // John Flaxman Scylla
夢の中で訪れた水族館 2
I bought a quarterly needlepoint magazine from 1991 today for $1 at an op shop, and there’s a four page spread about a woman who completely faithfully remakes samplers from the 1600s and the part that blows me away is that she was keeping women in history alive.
The original sampler maker was a teenaged girl called Loara she’s the only one known of seven siblings in that family. She was born approximately 1632 and had passed before her father had in 1656 which they know because it was mentioned in his will.
So in the 1630-40s a girl made a sampler, in 1991 a woman had put in years of research before recreating the sampler as Loara had 350 years earlier , and I’m reading about it in 2024.
Embroidery keeps women alive in history, and it’s part of why I love samplers so much.
Here’s a quote from samplers that I think about often:
(She/her) Hullo! I post poetry. Sometimes. sometimes I just break bottles and suddenly there are letters @antagonistic-sunsetgirl for non-poetry
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