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on the value of storytelling;

Into the Water - Paula Hawkins // The Nutritionist - Andrea Gibson //  LIFE Magazine 1963 - James Baldwin // Anti-depressants are so not a big deal - Crazy Ex-Girlfriend // Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 2017 - Kazuo Ishiguro // Invisible Planets - Hao Jingfang (tr. Ken Liu) // tumblr user @/poseidonsarmoury // Road to Hell (Reprise) - Hadestown // Letters to Milena - Franz Kafka // The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger // Exandria Unlimited: Calamity - Brennan Lee Mulligan

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"all I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else." -Franz Kafka

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Look at this (mediation on the fone)

Look at this

There was a Man -

not a man, there was

a Clique of Men

About a year or two or four older than me then

Sitting on Beautiful One Tree Hill;

as the radiant tangerine sun burned a hole into the sky and

melted below the gradient horizon, as the buildings reflected

back the shattered light through shades of glass,

as everyone stood together enraptured, fixed, quiet, standing,

letting the time pass

in community.

these FUCKERS were watching instagram reels

at full volume

oh my god the absolute-the brainrot

I didn't know it got to the students, but it did

breathing in the nature, reeling, eating like a kid

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The plum you're going to eat next summer

by Gayle Brandeis

The plum you’re going to eat next summer doesn’t exist yet; its potential lives inside a tree you’ll never see in an orchard you’ll never see, will be touched by a certain number of water droplets before it reaches you, by certain angles of light, by a finite amount of bugs and dust motes and hands you’ll never know. The plum you are going to eat next summer will gather sugar, gather mass, will harden at its center so it can soften toward your mouth. The plum you’re going to eat next summer doesn’t know you exist. The plum you are going to eat next summer is growing just for you.

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“The blood on my teeth begins to taste like a poem, like religion, like the way you look at me.”

— Sean Glatch, from “Caffeine, Pt. 1,″ 4:41

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i dearly miss when it was tense and taut and tender. it was a blossoming bruise i could press on whenever i wanted, however i wanted, lilies living right under my skin, white petals pushed up close to the surface—so close i could almost see them. i’d feel them when i’d lie on my side: my torso, my knees. i’d feel myself shrinking inwards, closer to myself, just to be closer to them. and sometimes it would bloom in my chest, its roots hugging my heart. other times it would unfurl in my head, the shoots following the contours of my brain. sometimes i plant the seeds inside me, and hope it’ll grow again, but nothing compares to the first flowering. the first time i got scared—they flowered too close to the surface, strangled my heart and polluted my blood. so i killed them. but i miss the sweet whisper of the petals. i miss their soothing caress. what’s replaced them now are poor imitations, weeds that shrivel and die before they even see the flesh, that murmur bitterly, like bruises that are weak and false and rough. no other flower has touched me like this before, no other flower ever will. one day, i’ll find it again, and we shall curl around each other until there is nothing between us, and we shall never let go.

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do you want to play sardines with me? please play sardines with me. we shall lie very very very still, and very silent, fingers on our lips. three. two. one. we will wrap our arms around ourselves and our chins will touch our knees. somewhere dark, where we don’t notice the changing sky or the changes in ourselves: if we don’t see it, it doesn’t happen. perhaps in that darkness everything will freeze and we can be nine years old and good forever. you will lie facing me and never turn away. you will lie facing me and never turn to look at anything else. nothing else. and we will breathe together in that tiny space, sharing the earthy cold air. and nothing will change. nothing will change. let’s play sardines.

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it’s scratched into the walls of my throat and stomach—if anyone looked hard enough they’d find it. but i don’t think this will ever be anything more but water i try to hold in my hands that slips through my fingers every time i get close. and i can hear it now: the whisper of a waterfall far away, taunting me sweetly with how close it is. and i can see it now: the gleam of the water as it collides with the sun to make silver. maybe gold. and every time i’m almost there, i’ve almost got it, something stops me, and another chance slips me by. and now, springs freshness fades away, the rain falls, and the golden decay of summer and all it brings snakes its way towards me. in that brown leaf-flinching-plastic-chair-bleaching-skin-cracking heat, everything evaporates away. then you spend early september sitting with the shame of it all, and later wildly imagining how you’ll grab it with both hands and hold it tight. but that’s the thing with water: it always finds a way to leak through the cracks.

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Keep vigil. The tongues flow yet To rhythms of sea and hill. Deeper than stone, guard The pure source, silence.

George Mackay Brown, 'To a Hamnavoe Poet of 2093' (Following a Lark, 1996)

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Beautiful from Ordinary Days

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Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, "Extracting the Stone of Madness", Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

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i thought wasting away was all there was for me, but joyful march has come and greeted me with bundles of flowers in her arms! persephone, persephone. she has told me that with the sun comes an unearthing of everything which makes me whole. and i see it: i glow in golden hour, i flutter like lace, i’m poised on the edge of something that might just be beautiful.

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-Hanif Abdurraqib

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cherry season has just ended. the wine red fruits are beginning to rot off the branches, rot in my mouth. bitter at the edges, while clinging to sweetness at the core, apologising with each bite. i’m sorry too. i think that first taste wasn’t enough, the way i greedily sucked the flesh off, rolling it around my tongue until only stubborn bits hugged the seed. it was like the way the final sliver of the moon cradles the night sky before she must leave it. it was like the way the backswash of a foamy wave drags itself over the sand it once knew. it was like the way i look at a friend as i begin to realise we are devouring each-other. i think that first taste was wonderful, but wasteful, as i ate, distracted, uncaring for the colour blooming, then bleeding, into me. and i think i should have done it differently. i think about how that first bite should have been dainty, i think about how i never should have let my teeth touch the seed. i think about how maybe i should have never taken that first bite at all. and i think about how, even now, it stays with me: the bitter aftertaste of sin. think about it nightly. i don’t know what season it is next, what tree or bush will unfurl it’s leaves and bring a fruit, shyly peeping from the branch, at first, then puff out her chest and shine at me. pretty. sultry. shall i reach out and sink my teeth into her too? shall i sit and loathe and yearn? these are the things i think about as the blue night stretches out above me.

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To YOU it’s bad writing. To ME it’s a very nuanced piece of work that explores subtle intricacies without outright saying it. And also it’s bad writing

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and again and again and again i wish i could pull it out of me! like a ball of string, or a bowl of spaghetti, or what might have been a pile of yellow skinny guts. like a stream of water from the tap, or the pit of a fruit. but instead, it sits inside of me, silent, waiting until it hooks its finger inside of my stomach and throat, worms and wriggles it’s way up to my head. then i’ll fidget with a ball of string, regret back on a bowl of spaghetti and feel every inch of my guts . i might chug a stream of water from the tap or think about the decaying pits of fruits. then maybe i’ll wriggle and hook my finger in the back of my throat. or maybe i’ll only wriggle the idea around the back of my head. some days i let it take me and mould my regret into something i can romanticise. some days i ignore it and try not to think about the texture, the taste, the weight on my bones. other days it says nothing to me, and i say nothing to it until the evening where the day stretches out endlessly behind me, a walk of shame. and ill go to bed with that inside me, and then spend my mornings, again and again and again thinking about how i’ll do it properly this time.