badgyal675 - Tumblr blog

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From Susan Matasovska’s “What Lesbians Do…” series: “What Lesbians Do In Bed” as featured in “The Crazy Jig: Gay and Lesbian Writing from Scotland 2” 🌹🏳️‍🌈

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“May we raise children who love the unloved things”

by Nicolette Sowder

May we raise children who love the unloved things–the dandelion, the worms and spiderlings. Children who sense the rose needs the thorn

& run into rainswept days the same way they turn towards sun…

And when they’re grown & someone has to speak for those who have no voice

may they draw upon that wilder bond, those days of tending tender things

and be the ones.

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lesbians will look at lan wangji and go “this baby can fit so much projection in it”

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“I am afraid. Because of my fear I reinforced love, I alerted all the forces of life, I armed love, with soul and words, to keep death from winning. Loving: keeping alive: naming.”

— Hélène Cixous, from Coming to Writing and Other Essays (via bellsofatlantis)

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I had a dream I saw you last night. We were on a train together, not speaking. Just sitting next to each other, our hands in our laps.

At the start of 2020, I had many dreams and goals and stupid ideas about things. I went back through all the pictures, watching the light in my eyes come back to rest. I find a note that I wrote myself - more friends! More YES!

You and I on the train don't speak. In a life before this, I would have been angry, maybe. Instead I am sad to my core about things. I try to shift people more tenderly these days. I actually turn out to be shit at setting boundaries, but I'm getting better about being open. About honesty.

I probably owe you an apology. I don't actually know if I do, or if you owe me one, or if it matters at all. There has been a lot of endings this year. I have killed about a third of what I planted. I have learned how to find the gentlest places. My new resolutions are simple and strange - to allow myself space. To take more joy in waiting. To share more moments. To hold nothing sacred except each other.

In my dream, the light shifts through the windows and the handles swing and neither of us are crying. In the real life, I keep getting messages from my students; thank-you notes because I actually treated them like people and told them to take my class less seriously than a pandemic. It feels sort of agonizing - I'm glad I could do something for them, but I don't understand how my bare minimum was more than the respect they're getting elsewhere.

I didn't pick up any hobbies. I haven't really been productive. I will be mad at myself about it, in due time - I am always historically mean to myself about terrible things. But right now I feel sort of at peace. I am just here for a ride, like you are, and the train is moving.

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Everything Is Going to Be Alright

by Derek Mahon

How should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The poems flow from the hand unbidden and the hidden source is the watchful heart; the sun rises in spite of everything and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight watching the day break and the clouds flying. Everything is going to be all right.

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it is disgusting to be alive in america right now. what have they told us? “let them eat cake” comes out of the mouths of every other politician. we are told to send kids back to school, that only their friends will die, and their teachers, and maybe you. we are told to just find another job in the middle of a hiring freeze and massive unemployment. we are told that healthcare is a privilege while being encouraged to “be smart” about covid. we are told to move somewhere else if the rent is too high. to just grow more vegetables if food is running thin. to spend less on coffee. if you don’t like it, they assure us, the problem is you. america is the land of opportunity! there are a million ways for you to be taken advantage of, and we will blame you for all of them.

jeff besos could end world hunger, could help yemen, could pay his employees an actual wage - and still be the richest man in history. the police continue to open fire on protesters, but the media has moved on. citizens are kidnapped by federal officers. children are in cages. flint still doesn’t have clean water. disney, gleefully paying minimum wage, happily opens to crowds. 

i click on another article where another rich white man tells us to simply be brave and to be proud when we are afraid and dying and aware we are being mulched for profit. there is a parable, somewhere, about what happens when the wolves are starved but the mayor has hundreds of sheep.

i am getting hungrier and hungrier. and there is no more bread to eat.

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Three photos of Black lesbian writer and activist Audre Lorde and her partner and fellow activist Gloria Joseph. Audre and Gloria lived together in Gloria’s home of St Croix in the Carribean until Audre’s death in 1992. The last thing Audre wrote was a note reading “Gloria, I love you.”

Learn more about Audre Lorde with our podcast

[images: Audre (left) and Gloria (right) wearing leis; Audre (left) standing behind Gloria (right), both laughing; Audre (left) and Gloria (right) seated, leaning on each other and laughing with their eyes closed]

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The first step towards self knowledge is being able to laugh at yourself.

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instgram.com/jericosilvers

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Me, logging in Tumblr: hi

Lesbians: oh god i love women so much I cry everytime i think about women god

Me, already in tears: ladies that’s so valid and I’m so proud of you