🗡️🖤⚔️🩸 Swordmates Part 11/∞

“Like any unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real when I’m not being touched.”

— Natalie Wee, from “Lonely,” Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (AMAZON / GOODREADS)

Kaveh Akbar, from “Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats“

Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? / @/oceaii (tumblr) / Liv Ullmann Changing / The Elektra Complex / Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman from "Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry / unknown / @/violentcherries (tumblr) / @/nutnoce (tumblr) / Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea / unknown

i. Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? [ "This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot." ]

ii. @/oceaii (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a deer. The deer looks forwards in the first panel and turns back to face the audience in the second panel. "Turn and face / the person you've become." ]

iii. Liv Ullmann Changing [ "I will never forget the loneliness I knew as a child. For a period in my life I hid behind a mask. Did not want to acknowledge any longing. / Now it is a part of me-something I can share. / Both the loneliness and the longing." ]

iv. The Elektra Complex [ "If you were to peel the skin of me apart as a fig's, you would finally understand. I am my mother's daughter. From poisoned seeds sprout poisoned fruits." ]

v. Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman [ "I didn't want / to be the dead star / that uses borrowed light to survive." ]

vi. unknown [ Black and white illustration of two deer. They are both labeled with words. The deer in the background says "just be." The deer in the foreground replies "just being is the hardest part." ]

vii. @/violentcherries (tumblr) [ "the environment you are not thriving in is not yours forever / IT'S OKAY TO LEAVE / ... / IT'S OKAY to abandon the things you used to love" ]

viii. @/nutnoce (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a scorpion doing chores. It's tail just barely curls over the front of a clothes line. Various pairs of socks hang from the clothes line. It stands before a bucket with more clothes inside. "I come from the toughest, meanest place you can imagine. / I want to be gentle, I want to die gently, but / It seems that when life gets hard / I have to get harder to match." ]

ix. Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea [ "I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar." ]

x. unknown [ "1. Man is a MORAL animal. / 2. You can get human beings to do anything - IF you can convince them it is moral. / 3. You can convince human beings that anything is moral." ]

LOVE AS VIOLENCE VS LOVE AS SOFTNESS

Ada Limon, The Good Fight // Mary Oliver, West Wind // Danez Smith, Bare // Sappho, Fragment 58.25-26 // Mitski, I Don’t Smoke // Ashe Vernon // Hozier, Cherry Wine // Shauna Barbosa, GPS // Richard Siken, Little Beast // Chen Chen, Summer [The sunflowers fall…] // Warsan Shire // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

I have so much love in me that I would like to cry.  

Simone de Beauvoir, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Sylvia Plath, Clarice Lispector

buy me a coffee

@inkskinned on tumblr/ “intimacy” by angelica alzona / “the leavetaking; poems: 1913-1956” by bertolt brecht / “helena” by my chemical romance / by daniel horowitz / “liberty” by paul eluard / “hard feelings” by lorde / “sunlight” by hozier / @sunsbleeding on tumblr

“She wanted a storm to match her rage.”

— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows (via wordsnquotes)

Web weaving about the untold story in you !

“But I know better. You’re dead, and I’m the worst kind of alive.”

— Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me (via incandescentghost)

this was always going to happen.

matthew stover, david levithan, margarita karapanou, aeschylus, karese burrows, richard siken