Reclining Odalisque By Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (19th Century)

in front of my mother and my sisters, i pretend love is cheap and vulgar. i act like it's a sin — i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. but at night i dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb — i dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.

— "salt", salma deera

objects in art: swords/daggers

I need to stop going to YouTube shorts or Instagram reels when I’m seeking auditory or visual stimulus. I just keep scrolling for that dopamine hit and it wastes all of my time because a lot of the content isn’t worth it. I keep telling myself to go to Spotify and listen to music instead, but I think the issue is that Spotify is just auditory and I need a visual component to go with it.

Reclining Nude by Alphonse Lecadre (1870)

this is it? is this what growing up is all about? we pass joy around in a bottle of cheap wine for one last time. I know, everyone is constantly changing and the earth is spinning and eventually everything happens just like it’s supposed to. but if my car were to crash on my way back to the city I call my new home, I wouldn’t be angry. my mom buys herself flowers now and I think that’s a good thing. she also keeps my scissors in a different shelf. and the tree in our backyard is gone. you never know when it’s the last time. is growing up nothing more than feeling younger than you are and leaving all the things you love so dearly behind?

-e.f

The people I love are the workers of my heart. They rebuild a heart they did not break from a house of ashes to a skyscraper ruling over the whole world.

- The Short Poem Series by Royla Paula Rădița Asghar

November Graveyard

by Sylvia Plath

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

things from sappho to call your girlfriend

ἀστέρων πάντων ὀ κάλλιστος (of all the stars, the fairest)

πόλυ πάκτιδος ἀδυμελεστέρα, χρύσω χρυσοτέρα (far sweeter-sounding than the lyre, far more golden than gold)

τὰν ἰόκολπον (violet-tressed, one with violets in her lap)

ὦ κάλα, ὦ χαρίεσσα κόρα (o beautiful, graceful girl)

ἦρος ἄγγελος ἰμερόφωνος ἀήδων (nightingale, sweet-voiced messenger of spring)

Ohio Total Solar Eclipse