mothtoflameblog

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Romeo and Juliet - Suns Collision by Luca Merli

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not a natural forest fire

alt brighter version under cut:

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What will you do, dear God, without us? How will you fare, alone again in the empty vast, in the dark of your creation, without us giving you your name?

— Khaled Mattawa, from "Shikwah," Fugitive Atlas

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Sylvia Plath, from “Poem for a Birthday: Who.” [ID in alt text]

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— a girl is a haunted house, tathève simonyan

[text ID: “This is me”, he whispers and I can feel the breath of his fist on my virgin cheekbone. / “This is me”, his voice is clearer, “do you take me as I am?” / But all I can think of is how my mother invented helplessness to raise my father up. / I refuse to build a throne on my head for another man.]

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I love the rain when it wraps me like a river. grafts me to the clouds. I share in the properties of the sky. I grow like a tree

— Etel Adnan, from "Friday, March 25th at 4pm," Time

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— Wendy Cope, The Orange

[text ID: I love you. I’m glad I exist.]

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In Fair Verona, 2021, Amy Beager

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frank brunner capturimg that specific travelling brand of loneliness immsooooo oh my god

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In snowfall, I haunted Motherhood’s cemeteries, the sweet fallen beneath my feet – Our Lady of the Birth Trauma, Our Lady of Psychosis. I wanted to speak to them, tell them I understood, but the words came out scrambled, so I knelt instead and prayed in the chapel of Motherhood, prayed for that whole wild fucking queendom, its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty, and all the souls that were in it. I prayed and prayed until my voice was a nightcry, sunlight pixellating my face like a kaleidoscope

— Liz Berry, from "The Republic of Motherhood," The Republic of Motherhood

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Let me see me before the politicized body; let me reach into mine own cage before biting into blood, tongues, heart & hands—wild-eyed with lungs full of gods you’d rather not fuck with. Give my body back to animals. Fuck a colonial casket. My organs are for the land that bore me. Rub my kidneys into the asphalt streets; let my liver sleep in a neon pit; draw a line of blood around the crossroads of my living—strip flesh as needed—tear with teeth.

— Angel Dominguez, from “[Dear Diego],” Desgraciado

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. . . lay me down in a room of shadows so I could shut my eyes at last and the hush would cover me like a burial sheet and someone gentle would rest their palms on me, touch me with a light so staggering I’d be opened up, my soul rising from the x-ray of my skeleton like a white-veined moth, my body below hollow as an instrument, humming with voices

— Liz Berry, from "The Spiritualist Church," The Republic of Motherhood

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although i understand why tightly-plotted stories are, by and large, preferred by the majority of contemporary audiences, i have to say: i’ve always been more keen on meandering and polyphonic narratives. just… give me all the overly ambitious and grandiose stories with a strong sense of place, over-the-top aesthetic, ensemble cast, multiple digressions, and no conventional plot (or at least no conventional three-act structure) to speak of, and i shall be a very content woman indeed.

(& on a related note: i sincerely believe that we ought to bring back the tradition of long-winded quasi-philosophical doorstoppers originally published in monthly instalments. out with the sleek shallowness of dirtbag realism!)

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good poetry pierces a membrane you were unaware was solid

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— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

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Cupid and Psyche (Antonio Canova), Cupid and Psyche (Domenico Cardelli), Mary Magdalene (Antonio Canova) | Hermitage Museum