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[interstatelovesongs]

1 So, it’s morning. Or maybe afternoon. There’s light pouring through the window and it’s got you looking the kind of haloed and soft you only see in movies. I’m only half awake but I’m already writing poetry about your eyelashes, can you believe that?   2 In the mirror, I pretend to watch myself watching myself brushing my teeth. Instead, I watch you run your hands through your hair: again and again and again and again. More than once, I’ve seen the way you try to rearrange your body into negative space. Like one of those optical illusions— the vase with the two faces. You forgot you could be both of them. You forgot that when you lean too close to a work of art the whole picture blurs and disappears.   3 A new painting: one with no negative space. You as steady hands and solid ground. You with a ukulele and a dog. Coffee and cayenne. Cheap wine and expensive whiskey. All that blue in your closet. You as the perfect first date and something soft to come home to. Bad jokes and good intentions and all that— light.   4 Yes, light. Listen, so, it’s late. Or the time of night some people call morning. It’s dark in the car, but you laugh— I mean, really laugh. The kind that catches you by surprise and crinkles up the corners of your eyes—and it’s like a camera flash in a windowless room. It’s the best thing I’ve seen, all day.   5 Every morning, the sun has to relearn how to outshine you. Sometimes even she is not bright enough.

INVENTING NEW WAYS TO CALL YOU BEAUTIFUL by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

[interstatelovesongs]

For an entire month, the Texas sky was nothing but a broken water-main—and the state that had spent decades slow-roasting over a pit of Christian gospel and light-skinned southern values was suddenly neck-deep in its own baptism. Turns out that when you have been this starving for rain, when you have been dry for this long, the end of the drought only looks like a miracle on day one. By day thirty, our cities are drowning. I know, now, how easily skin can turn swampland— that desert soil is the first to oversaturate, that it only takes two weeks of proper attention for my body to spill over. It wasn’t long after I met you that I became all flash flood and rising water tables. Understand what torrential rain does to a heart in a fifteen year drought— just look what mother nature did to Texas. I met you and suddenly there were no more dry-spells. My valleys sloshed with rainwater; there was nowhere to put all that sky. It was all the ocean could do to keep up with us. It was all I could do to keep my head above water. There’s a reason you don’t give a starving man a feast—his body has forgotten how to be full. He will make himself sick with this wanting. When all that Texas drought met you I flooded my rivers, abandoned my cities, soaked rot into the walls of my apartment. For forty days and forty nights Texas and I became new seas. I drowned under the weight of what you thought was a good thing–it’s been too long since this was freely given and not something I had to go searching for in the night—too long since the sky has been anything but clear. The storm should have been the end to the dry season. Instead, it was the start of the flood. You can’t dump heaven on the drought; all you learn, is that Texas red dirt can turn quicksand in an instant. The end of the drought only looks like a miracle on day one. By day thirty, I am all tremor and panic attack, fear flooding the basement. Your smile– the place where the sky opens up and pours.

I GAVE YOU FLOOD by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

[interstatelovesongs]

[interstatelovesongs]

[interstatelovesongs]

I lose myself in your words, in every story you share and I want to write it all down so that I won’t forget. I want to apologize for being so distracted when you speak by the way you smell like smoke and sweat-soaked cotton and how you are always warm, even when your hands are shivering and wet from the rain. I want to write poems that leave you short of breath, the way I am when you light a cigarette, in the fleeting moment that your face glows between your palms. I want and I want and I wonder what you’re thinking about just before you kiss me; somewhere in the valley between hesitation and impulse that rings in your ears and almost sounds like certainty.

Mousetrap (via littleredrockett)

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the magic chair

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Topographical blueprints from 1928.

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[interstatelovesongs]

megan

On the days that are hardestto get out of bedand on the nightsthat are so lonelythat only fearoffers its companyplease remember:you have been through helland backjust to breathe easy.You have seen dead bodies,but you are not one of them.You are alive, alive, alive.