shoreparty - Tumblr blog

[shoreparty]

a brief meditation on breath

i have diver’s lungs from holding my breath for so long. i promise you i am not trying to break a record sometimes i just forget to exhale. my shoulders held tightly near my neck, i am a ball of tense living, a tumbleweed with steel-toed boots. i can’t remember the last time i felt light as dandelion. i can’t remember the last time i took the sweetness in & my diaphragm expanded into song. they tell me breathing is everything, meaning if i breathe right i can live to be ancient. i’ll grow a soft furry tail or be telekinetic something powerful enough to heal the world. i swear i thought the last time i’d think of death with breath was that balmy day in july when the cops became a raging fire & sucked the breath out of Garner; but yesterday i walked 38 blocks to my father’s house with a mask over my nose & mouth, the sweat dripping off my chin only to get caught in fabric & pool up like rain. & i inhaled small spurts of me, little particles of my dna. i took into body my own self & thought i’d die from so much exposure to my own bereavement—they’re saying this virus takes your breath away, not like a mother’s love or like a good kiss from your lover’s soft mouth but like the police it can kill you fast or slow; dealer’s choice. a pallbearer carrying your body without a casket. they say it’s so contagious it could be quite breathtaking. so persistent it might as well be breathing                        down your neck—

Yesenia Montilla

[shoreparty]

Desire Path        

The butterflies pull, oblivious to where I wasn’t willing.

Wandering death-bird, diminutive echo

of whence we had been gentle. There was love, I’ll give you that

beneath the grass that seethed— an endless, viceroy affliction.

Now men design machines that render love

as obsolete—unless we won’t believe it. Take

my hand. What would you do with me in the unimagined prairie? Louise Mathias

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Luster        

Come gondola tongue, come narrow passage, come lunar water vapor, nightfall summoning the tide of him up and up

this begging shore, shining cliffs, his hard hands a storm cloud in our shared sky, synchronous orbit luring me to the thunder

of that body, silver satellite, the long milk he laps from the canal of my spine, I’m all eyelash and inhale, all estuary, all course and crushed

by the meteor of him, by the crater pretending to be sea in the telescope’s lone and limpid eye, our only cries were answers, crawling

together through a light so clear it felt like wind, like undertow you could—will—drown in. Jess Smith

[shoreparty]

We think there is another shore. We stand with the new life.

Hymn

Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus

—Livy

We are like strangers in the wild places. We watch

the deer swinging the intricate velvet from its antlers, never knowing

we are only as immense as what we shed in the dance.

The bride and bridegroom stand at the altar. Each thing

learned in mercy has a river in it. It holds the cargo

of a thousand crafts of fire that went down at evening.

We can neither endure our misfortunes nor face

the remedies needed to cure them. The fawns move

through the forest, and we move through the ruins of the dance.

Like Job, the mourner lays his head on the cold oak

of the table. His heart is a hundred calla lilies

under the muck of the river, opening before evening.

We think there is another shore. We stand with the new life

like a mooring rope across our shoulders, never guessing

that the staying is the freightage of the dance.

Orpheus turned to see his Eurydice gone. The Furies tore him

into pieces. The sun, he said, I will worship the sun.

But something in his ruin cried out for evening, evening, evening.

The wrens build at dusk. Friends, I love their moss-dressed

nests twisting in the pitch of the rafters, for they have taught me

that the ruins of the dance are the dance.

– joseph fasano

[shoreparty]

We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too.

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (via theclassicsreader)

[shoreparty]

Everything will be lost. Your childhood is lost. Your great-grandmother is lost. The blue coat you wore when you were a teenager, that you have forgotten about completely, but will remember suddenly with an astonished pang of love when you see it in a photograph; that too is lost. Your father's toys are lost, the trust you had in someone you thought could protect you is lost, the pleasure you used to take in cheap candy is lost. You will lose everything you have. The small things, like the mug you like to drink out of, the bus route that will be changed so you can no longer easily get to the mall with the good store, the woman you are used to seeing on the corner will one morning no longer be there, the hinge will break, your toenails will grow thick and yellow, you will realise with horror that loosing the people who are now old will be nothing to the pain of losing the people behind you who are now young. You will one day, if you are lucky, have a body that will never be free of minor pain, and never be able to lift your arms freely above your head again. It happens every winter. Snow will cover the grass and there will be no more green. And then Spring will come and the medieval poet looks back at his life and cries, "Ou sont les neige d'antan!" Everything will be lost and this is unbearable and this is good. Anything that is permanent is hard to love. Things that we can take for granted are hard to love. If you never get to see a new street you don't love the street you live on, but feel trapped by it. If you can't lose something there is no need to cherish it. You don't need to feel protective or to appreciate it. When you can't breath you appreciate oxygen. When you are shut up into a building with stale air you long to go outside. If nothing every changed nothing good could ever happen. If we were immortal then we could not have and would not have children. We would live forever, doing repetitive things for millennia with nothing new to experience. There would be no new crocuses, no children taking lurching first steps, no new movie to settle down and watch on the battered old couch that is so comfortable but beginning to fall apart. There would be no new food to try and no new person to fall in love with, no discoveries and no epiphanies. Of course, you want things to live, just a little bit longer. You weren't ready yet! Not now, but when you downsize to move into a senior's residence would be the right time to get rid of your ticket. Not now, but when you die, you will the ticket to your niece. Not now, but when?

Jane the Brown on Ask Mefi

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Loss only happens with love, and love is always worth it. You can't love the ticket without risking losing it, the same way you can't love anything without knowing that it might outlive you, but even so someday it will no longer be something you see, or feel or remember. Loss exists like pain, for a purpose. Loss exists so that you will hunt for the loved thing, so that the most loved things bring a smile to your face when you see them because seeing them reassures you they are still here. The pain of loss exists so that you remember to be careful with people and with things because they - we - are all vulnerable. The pain of loss exists so that you hold that coffee mug you love with two hands, carefully when you you dry it. The pain of loss is what made you stay in touch with some friends and divest yourself of others who would have tainted your memories as they changed.

Jane the Brown on Ask Mefi

[shoreparty]

You didn't lose a thing, you misplaced a trigger -- an object that reminds you of an experience. But the experience is still as fresh as it was last month, right? You still remember buying the ticket, and getting ready for the concert, and seeing David Bowie on the stage, and going somewhere after the show, and the sound of the ringing in your ears and the smell of the sweat and the taste of the drink and the rasp of your throat the next day? Did you think about all that every now and then when you saw the ticket? Draw the ticket. Photoshop a duplicate. Hell, write "Ceci n'est pas une billet de Bowie." on a napkin, and put that in the frame. And then, not only will you remember the sound and the smell and the taste and the rasp, but you'll get to remember looking for it with someone you love and the bitter tang of thinking you'd lost something, and the relief when you remembered that you still have that concert, as much as anyone in the world -- more than anyone in the world, because no one else was standing right where you were. You didn't lose a thing.

Etrigan on Ask Mefi

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There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

[shoreparty]

— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

[shoreparty]

Who is flying this plane?

I remember, when I was a kid, once seeing my father strike my mother for absolutely no reason. Though he sometimes did the same thing to me, I did not realize that he did it sheerly out of bad temper, and believed that his trumped-up justifications (‘You talk too much; ‘Don’t look at me like that’) somehow warranted the punishment. But the day I saw him hit my mother (because she had remarked, innocently, that the neighbours were building an addition to their house; later he would claim she had provoked him, that it was a reproach about his abilities as a wage earner, and she, tearfully, would agree) I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?

-- The Secret History by Donna Tartt

[shoreparty]

Daddy watches whatever she’s doing on the computer, feeding her a grape every time he eats one. She’s probably uploading the latest family snapshots on Facebook for our out-of-town relatives. With everything that’s going on, what can she say? “Sekani saw cops harass his daddy, but he’s doing so well in school. #ProudMom.” Or, “Starr saw her best friend die, keep her in your prayers, but my baby made the honor roll again. #Blessed.” Or even, “Tanks are rolling by outside, but Seven’s been accepted into six colleges so far. #HeIsGoingPlaces.”

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

[shoreparty]

Unfollowing me is the same as saying “I don’t like you anymore.”

Plus she unfollowed my Tumblr.

She has no clue that I know. I once posted a picture of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy who was murdered for whistling at a white woman in 1955. His mutilated body didn’t look human. Hailey texted me immediately after, freaking out. I thought it was because she couldn’t believesomeone would do that to a kid. No. She couldn’t believe I would reblog such an awful picture.

Not long after that, she stopped liking and reblogging my other posts. I looked through my followers list. Aww, Hails was no longer following me. With me living forty-five minutes away, Tumblr is supposed to be sacred ground where our friendship is cemented. Unfollowing me is the same as saying “I don’t like you anymore.”

-- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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“Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.”

— Anne Michaels

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“These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

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Alexander the Great

Dear wonders, fairies, pixie dust:

Give me what is left of luck

So that I can not turn to rust;

Into constellations, tucked.

[shoreparty]

Poetry

“If there exists in my blood a map, it is one I keep folded for fear of where it does not lead.”

— Leila Chatti, “When I Tell My Father I Might Begin to Pray Again,” published in Virginia Quarterly Review