Treeleaftown

in a few years, we'll probably be discussing how gfm and paypal are stealing from a population that is already suffering from a genocide.

ive seen so many gazans who've had their fundraisers shut down for no apparent reason. all of them were depending on that fundraiser to afford necessities. how does one afford to buy basic necessities (that are scarce and expensive) when their singular source of money has been unjustly closed?

my friend suad is a mother of a little baby boy, khaled. her son was born in the current genocide and has known nothing but the sound of bombing. he has respiratory issues. suad's gfm was unjustly shut down. she's moved to chuffed to ensure that she can raise money to ensure her child's well being.

it would mean a lot to me if you guys could donate to her and her baby. her fundraiser has been verified (#279).

please donate here

The San Francisco Examiner, California, February 25, 1935

first name mckenna. last name terence. if the ten strip isnt perforated there is no need to tear it. four dried grams later im more rooted than a carrot. four hits later and i'm baked like bread in paris. i no longer recognize my parents

Bruno Barbey. China. Guangxi province. 1980.

Some of my friend. I think did not know I would be bothering them for this long into their lives . And our friendship is definitely me nosing my way in . But u know what . If they really wanted me gone they could do it. I believe in them

life is beautiful and i am beautiful and everything coming will be better than anything that has ever left or ended

Ok now I’m reading more about her apparently she was anti abolishment of slavery?? I don’t want to be her wish cancelled

I’m too tired to keep calling my little sister I’m too tired to keep hanging out with my friend I’m too tired for all of this I just want to be Emily Dickinson I’m sorry

When the painter said, OK, you guys, take off your clothes! I startled at the plural, assuming I’d been engaged to model by myself. But then the dark-skinned god I knew as Aaron from my Econ class unzipped his jeans, and dropped them, grinning, on the floor. So I did, too, and clambered up beside him on the plywood box that elevated us above the clutch of paint-stained easels. Thoughtfully, the students posed our naked bodies. Someone fluffed the crispy hair between my legs into a dark brown bristling fan. And someone pinched the sides of Aaron’s face to pinken up his cheeks. Privately, I installed myself inside that mental space where I had hidden as a child when the world could be aborted no other way …

It was part of my plan to walk unclothed among the portraits my unclad body had provoked. So when we broke for lunch, the students lunging in a herd out back to smoke, I did. If you had asked me then why I modeled, I’d have said, to overcome my bourgeois insecurities, to combat my fear of what might happen if I showed myself completely naked to someone else. But if you asked me now? I’d describe the privilege of walking among a museum of strangers’ images devoted to oneself, and tell you what a privilege it was to see myself the varied ways that others did.

Some silly fellow had painted nipples on me the size and shape of frying eggs. Another jokester had shrunk them down as small as M&Ms. But someone serious and sad had shared a vision of my head as a clotted orb of hair and mouth, and brushed in underneath, a body headless as the horseman in the myth. Then I seemed to walk into the darkroom of my mind’s own eye and saw the self I’d always felt inside but never known: a complicated, unsmiling creature with a fear-tinged face. Around her the aura of something golden was fighting with whip-like straps of something black. She was staring straight into the future, trying to get out, trying to conceal her fear, completely unaware of how it glistened and glowed, and of how irresistible it was for the artist to spread it across the canvas so that everyone could see.

kate daniels, when I was the muse