a-tiny-poet

[a-tiny-poet]

the knife

let us meet in the middle in a place so very far away from here where i don't have to deal with these stares these whispered conflictions anymore

i would've liked to run you over in my car i would've liked to lay with you and look at the stars we can go across the ocean, i really don't mind i am not rooted to anything except you

did that make you smile? this is my only goal, with every word i say i'm entranced with the way you cut your apples would you peel me open the same way?

i wish you'd touch me the way you touch yourself i want you to run your fingers through my hair i want you to hit my thigh when it gets too much i think i just want to be you

with all these new places we go all these pages i lick and fold i've seen everything in the world but i still can't tear my eyes away from you

and tonight i find you pale and blue leaking onto my knife i never meant to hurt you this is just what it would've always come to

[a-tiny-poet]

ha. I bet your parents warned you about the types of women you'd meet in the big city. but sister, that ain't me. your parents ain't never seen a bitch like me. your parents don't know a bitch like me is possible. they don't know how far science has come. I'm basically the worst thing you'll ever see, and the best shit you'll ever feel. I walk through the door with my arm around you and your parents shit and vomit, guaranteed.

I don't look like much out on the street, but when I let the dogs out the girls start barking. you don't date me to piss off your parents, you date me to make them envy you. I keep a folding chair in the trunk of my corolla just in case your dad needs a place to sit while I'm fucking his wife. that's fucking right, I'm a gamer. I won't apologize. let me ask you something, if you could piss cum, would you apologize?

cause I don't shoot ropes, I throw down. humans can't pronounce the word for what my wiener does. I'm at your granddad's funeral seven days a week. look at me wrong and you can kiss your ass goodbye, cause I am the dad who works at nintendo. I was born on a saturday. I am the danger. don't fuck with me, kid.

[a-tiny-poet]

In the dark, the deer mistook my headlights for stars

[a-tiny-poet]

BALLAD FOR BLACK CASSANDRA

a comic/poem

PART 1/2

Read Part 2 HERE

Title design by the incredible @shivanasookdeo.

[a-tiny-poet]

some sort of love poem

[a-tiny-poet]

"I want to be a dragon."

[a-tiny-poet]

“i could fix him”, “i could make him worse”. yeah, well, I could meet him at the genesis of the universe, where the spaces between matter first gain sentience, and spark and spit their way into being—where the cradle of stars first take on a definitive kind of gravity and heat. I could be the engineer of creation. I could ask a question. I could stand across from him on a battlefield, trembling and reeking of ichor. I could hit the ground retching, all the bones in my body turning brackish and oil-slicked. I could lurch my way into a new world, a recalibration of reality in which I only know kindness as a set of snapping jaws, as a thing to flinch away from. I could meet him in the garden, then, when the air's all hyacinth and dripping gold. And I could ache. Oh, how I could ache. I could follow him through every wretched moment of history. I could trail after him like a hollow-eyed dog. I could hide my irises, could hide the brutal bloodiness of an all-too-human heart. I could hold the gun as I pretend not to pray, as I taste bile and will my hands to steadiness. I could trust him. And I could ache. I could bite my tongue, cypher the words in my mouth, gnash them between jagged teeth. I could swallow my heart. I could go slower. I could meet him at the end of the world, when hope claws its way up my throat, hungry and keening like a treacherous thing.

I could kiss him with six thousand years of want lodged and breaking in the mausoleum of my chest. I could hand him the blade; I could let him twist the knife. I could be forgiven. And still I could ache.

[a-tiny-poet]

the impossible return

[a-tiny-poet]

SGKSGKSGK MA’AM

[a-tiny-poet]

Happy APAHM and here’s a poem comic about my experiences being trans and Chinese I did in three days for my English class! 

[a-tiny-poet]

Supernatural Sapphic Comics Masterpost

Updating an old post. For all you lovers of those lesbian monsters, a masterpost of short comics here on tumblr. Enjoy and feel free to add more!

Selich by @jellydraws

The Beast Did Not Devour Me by @tooquirkytolose

The Dwarf Bride by @sammymontoya

Beauty And The Beast by @another-confused-ace

Bride of the Rose Beast by @mishacakes

The Fish Bride by @melgillman

Sweetrock by @melgillman

HSTHETE by @melgillman

Unnamed Rusalka Comic / part 2 by @amarcia

Unnamed Witch Comic by @charminglyantiquated

Unnamed Curse Comic by @charminglyantiquated

Unnamed Mermaid Comic by @charminglyantiquated

Unnamed Banshee Comic by @charminglyantiquated

Unnamed Fae Comic by @tooquirkytolose

[a-tiny-poet]

i will defend improvised storytelling till the day i fucking die i think stories told by people under pressure to do it fast, stories told in collaboration…. that shits gorgeous and ALIVE. have you ever gone to a writing workshop and someone writes the rawest shit in the entire world during a ten minute free write? playing dnd and some dialogue is so moving it makes you wonder how it came from your dumbass friends? got really into one of those ‘one sentence at a time’ campfire story games and ended up making something— totally unrecorded, lost except to the people who were there— that should have been in the fucking moma?

people are full to the BRIM with stories and honing that storytelling into a specific practice (ex. writing) is for sure a learned skill that takes tons of practice to do effectively but…… it’s there. it’s there and anyone can tap into it if they’re given opportunity and an audience to say it to.

look, the point of telling stories is to connect with other people. and all we’ve ever done throughout human history is connect connect connect so is it any wonder when you put a human being in front of an outlet and you say ‘tell me a story’, no one stays silent? 

[a-tiny-poet]

more than anything i hate the way the internet categorizes aesthetic. art dealing with trauma is "traumacore" art dealing with the nostalgia and longing for the simpler days of childhood is "kidcore" ANYTHING experimental is "weirdcore" its such a shitty reductive way to look at art and more often than not boxes artists into labels they never consented to have placed upon them to begin with, which is worst of all. to see someones vent art about idk, being assaulted as a child and going omg hashtag traumacore hashtag sadcore is crazy its fucking crazy like i could kill you.

[a-tiny-poet]

here are my favourite poems to do with writing that are priceless and feel as informative as a guidebook on poetry writing:

to a young poet by mahmoud darwish (most favourite!)

how to be a poet by wendell berry (favourite!)

the real prayers are not the words but the attention that comes first by mary oliver

poem written in a copy of beowulf by jorge luis borges

the wolf’s eyelash by c.p. estes

digging by seamus heaney

?poetry by pablo neruda

ars poetica by archibald macleish

my heart by frank o’hara

notes on the art of poetry by dylan thomas

the joy of writing by wislawa szymborska

how to eat a poem by eve merriam

basho on haiku: 17 statements

how to write a poem in a time of war by joy harjo

discontinuous poems by fernando pessoa

you can feel free to add on more poems about poems to this if you know any good ones!

[a-tiny-poet]

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

[a-tiny-poet]

I am laughing so hard oh my god clickhole