jeanetteleblanc - Tumblr blog

[jeanetteleblanc]

it isn't really complicated, but i still can't tell my grandma about it. my girlfriend is also my boyfriend and i'm her girlboyfriend and there are a lot of days this feels like smoothing sheets over a good mattress. it feels like getting a cup of good hot chocolate. we paint our nails lesbian flag pink, and i watch her eyelashes make shadows on her cheeks. she wants to kiss me because i am really good at baking, and i want to kiss her because when i am freaked out about how i spilled coffee, she just hands me extra napkins and helps me clean. he is so handsome i want to eat my fist. they once just winked at me and i couldn't talk for like the next fifteen minutes.

i haven't seen the L word and i was raised catholic. my earliest experiences with queer relationships were through harrowing conversations and hushed questions and blood on the ground. i didn't like boys soon enough. what, are you gay? asked to a 6th grader, almost like a demand.

when she is asleep next to me and i can feel the dreams run up and down her body, i pretend we are both somewhere in the stars. i like to picture a future full of fruit trees, and writing him poetry. sometimes she wakes up, has a whole conversation with me, goes back to sleep, and utterly forgets that we ever even spoke. she is always kind to me, even in that liminal half-there ghost. i like the croaked, raw way her voice sounds in the very-early morning, the way she always seems surprised i'm still here, and home.

on the internet, there are a lot of people who would be annoyed by both of us, and how labels must be pruned into orchids. a box has to hold and define the insides. people must be organized.

we went on a date last night, and the host said, oh, table for 2 nice ladies? neither of us are ladies, but also we are very much 2 nice ladies. i have been wearing her sweater nonstop. he has frequently been forced into wearing my taylor swift official merch quarter-zip because i was worried about him catching a chill, and you simply cannot be cool in an official taylor swift quarter-zip. do not worry: they listen to better music than i do, and their voice sounds like leaves falling.

i wear the skirts and makeup and i am better with spackle and know how to drive stick. recently someone commented on my work - you're just a man trying to reappropriate lesbian spaces. sometimes i feel like she is a clementine to me, and sometimes i feel like he is a german shepherd and sometimes i feel they are a bird. i like watching his hands over a guitar. can i write this poem, even? how can you be a lesbian if you're sometimes with a man? or you are the man?

how can i, huh. you know, our first date lasted 3 days. we'd been flirting for over a year before i finally asked her out. i'd already written her into poetry. she'd already written me into songs.

last night, in the late night, when they woke up again, confused about where they were, they said - oh, thank god. this is your arm. there's just something so precious to me about the specifics, the denotation that the arm was (thank god!) mine. i really liked that definition. i liked the obvious relief because i understand it.

i say yeah, i have a partner. i mean - oh. thank god. it's your arm.

[jeanetteleblanc]

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

[jeanetteleblanc]

MISTAKE

For years I have seen dead animals on the highway   and grieved for them only to realize they are   not dead animals they are t shirts   or bits of blown tire and I have found   myself with this excess of grief   I have made with no object to let   it spill over and I have not known   where to put it or keep it and then today   I thought I know I can give it to you

HEATHER CHRISTLE

[jeanetteleblanc]

SNOW AND DIRTY RAIN

Close your eyes. A lover is standing too close to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me with your entire body. Lie under the covers, pretending to sleep, while I’m in the other room. Imagine my legs crossed, my hair combed, the shine of my boots in the slatted light. I’m thinking My plant, his chair, the ashtray that we bought together. I’m thinking This is where we live. When we were little we made houses out of cardboard boxes. We can do anything. It’s not because our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we struggle with. The attempt to say Come over. Bring your friends. It’s a potluck, I’m making pork chops, I’m making those long noodles you love so much. My dragonfly, my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing for blood, but we are at the crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me tight, it’s getting cold. We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and a gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it. The lawn is drowned, the sky on fire, the gold light falling backward through the glass of every room. I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube? We’ve read the back of the book, we know what’s going to happen. The fields burned, the land destroyed, the lovers left broken in the brown dirt. And then it’s gone. Makes you sad. All your friends are gone. Goodbye Goodbye. No more tears. I would like to meet you all in Heaven. But there’s a litany of dreams that happens somewhere in the middle. Moonlight spilling on the bathroom floor. A page of the book where we transcend the story of our lives, past the taco stands and record stores. Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one. We have been very brave, we have wanted to know the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes. The dream going on with all of us in it. Penciling in the bighearted slob. Penciling in his outstretched arms. Our Father who art in Heaven. Our Father who art buried in the yard. Someone is digging your grave right now. Someone is drawing a bath to wash you clean, he said, so think of the wind, so happy, so warm. It’s a fairy tale, the story underneath the story, sliding down the polished halls, lightning here and gone. We make these ridiculous idols so we can pray to what’s behind them, but what happens after we get up the ladder? Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it? Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are the monsters we put in the box to test our strength against. Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here’s the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next? The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for you to love me. If this isn’t the kingdom then I don’t know what is. So how would you catalog it? Dawn in the fields? Snow and dirty rain? Light brought in in buckets? I was trying to describe the kingdom, but the letters kept smudging as I wrote them: the hunter’s heart, the hunter’s mouth, the trees and the trees and the spaces between the trees, swimming in gold. The words frozen. The creatures frozen. The plum sauce leaking out of the bag. Explaining will get us nowhere. I was away, I don’t know where, lying on the floor, pretending I was dead. I wanted to hurt you but the victory is that I could not stomach it. We have swallowed him up, they said. It’s beautiful, it really is. I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want. You said Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube… We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

RICHARD SIKEN

[jeanetteleblanc]

Is it possible to stop loving everything? The owl. The hawk. Every person I meet. To see everyone as my mother. To have a heart like this is to be made of midnight. There are always too many questions to ask and not enough time. To love so much is to live within birds. I have been waiting for this heart to fade or at least to kneel.

— Victoria Chang, from “Marfa, Texas,” in The Trees Witness Everything

[jeanetteleblanc]

“I questioned why poetry found a most unlikely companion in me. I didn’t fit anywhere. I was struggling as a full-time student. I had a job researching Native art and was raising two children alone. That was struggle enough; however, there was another plane of consciousness on which I was fighting every night that I lay down to rest. As I slid into the borderlands between waking and sleeping, negative beings attempted to pull me into their darkness. I learned to escape them by using words to make a ladder to bring me back. The words needed force from the gut to give enough power to emerge from their reach, to a place where these beings could no longer exist as a threat. I was told by my poetry self to lift myself up with words, with songs. They would change my being and I could no longer be destroyed by that which wanted to enslave or destroy me.”

— Joy Harjo, from “The Craft of Writing: Joy Harjo on listening and writing with intention”

[jeanetteleblanc]

“It is a muggy August morning and the air in the room is still. Well over half the year has gone by already, which is a worry. I wanted to make something of myself this year. There’s still time, I think. Definitely some time.”

— Yrsa Daley-Ward, “The Terrible” 

[jeanetteleblanc]

There will always be a person who looks like a poem the earth wrote to keep you alive.

Juansen Dizon

[jeanetteleblanc]

“When I think of my brother’s childhood friends, of the two who are dead, I become, in those seconds, not inconsolable but wanting for my parents. I am homesick. Parent-sick. Cousin-sick. Okra-sick. . . I am sick for those years when I was paying attention without purpose. When I was arranging stories free of import, and when my imagination could draw courage instead of warrant that I stay in. . . I am sick for using change to buy lime popsicles. Sick for slamming doors to emphasize my temper. I am sick for not perceiving winter. For being unbothered by February’s frost. . . I am sick for packing a snowball but being too shy to throw it and so I’d carry it in the gloved pillow of my palm like a pet snowball. I am sick for using small scissors to cut cardboard hearts; for gluing them on paper doilies and writing someone’s name with felt marker. I am sick for cardboard and paper and markers, and the time it took to make things before gifting them. . . I am sick for my incorruptibility. Sick for believing. Sick for my body before. Before I’d ever noticed I was in possession of one. Before full-lengths. Before I knew anything about valleyed collarbones, a stomach’s folds, smooth legs, small wrists. . . I am sick for wearing orange. For those years when I knew nothing about the need to abide. When I smiled with my teeth.”

— Durga Chew-Bose, from “Part of a Greater Pattern,” in Too Much and Not the Mood

[jeanetteleblanc]

poet of an ordinary heartbreak, chris abani

[jeanetteleblanc]

Franny Choi, Soft Science

[jeanetteleblanc]

{Quotes:Nitya prakash/Richard siken ,crush}

[jeanetteleblanc]

the past isn’t behind you it coils inside your body that’s why some years you feel closer and more nostalgic for certain ages than others just fyi

[jeanetteleblanc]

Ocean Vuong, from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

[jeanetteleblanc]

David Wright: If I can quote you at yourself, you’ve talked about how literature can hold open human wounds, the wounds of history, how poetry can allow us to see the ruptures in the language, the ruptures in the self, the ruptures in the culture that occur in situations of extremity. It strikes me that the story you were telling about the prison and going to the barrio and being in that room [during her time in El Salvador as a human rights advocates, at the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War]. That’s not a story you’ve allowed to heal over in any way. It’s a wound that’s supposed to be held open in some way. Carolyn Forché: Yes. Because I don’t want to lose what I learned there. And I don’t want to move on. And I don’t want closure. And I don’t want to recover. Because I don’t want to lose what happened to me. I don’t want that to be changed back. I don’t want to return to the obliviousness that I had participated in before that. You have to hold things open in order to nurture whatever new awareness was born there.

— from “Assembling Community: A Conversation with Carolyn Forché” by David Wright

[jeanetteleblanc]

[jeanetteleblanc]

Natasha Trethewey, from Thrall: Poems; "Mythology"