#angel excerpt

[feral-ballad]

Ana Istarú, tr. by Shaun T. Griffin & Emma Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti, from These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women; "XV"

[Text ID: “you are a forgotten angel”]

[fragmented-lullabies]

honestly so true of them

[philosophors]

“Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

— Maya Angelou

[that-butch-archivist]

"Tess was a performance artist and part-time jewelry maker who now worked as a set designer. [...] The first night we spent together, I taught her to knit — my classic seduction technique (High Femme Camp Antics, or HFCA) — and about frisson, that carbonated feeling that accompanies a crush. We stared at each other for a long time, unblinking. Because I knew that this otherwise might take forever (lesbians!), I finally asked Tess point-blank if she felt a frisson for me (HFCA). In response, Tess kissed me hard, with teeth. I knew she wanted to fuck, but I pushed her hands away dramatically when they crept under my skirt (HFCA). I told her that I didn’t typically sleep with people so soon (HFCA), which was true not for any real reason but because I was privately humiliated by my body (HFCA). Instead of letting her fuck me, I scratched Tess’s entire torso with my long, pink fingernails (HFCA). “Her fingernails drifted down my neck, across my shoulders,” Jess Goldberg, the butch narrator of Stone Butch Blues, says of a high femme whose camp antics thrill her. “I’d forgotten the sheer pleasure of a high femme tease.” “Your fingernails are full of frisson,” Tess said as morning light began to stream in through the window above her bed. “I know,” I said. I recently read a collection of funny stories by Lesléa Newman, high-femme chronicler of dyke life in the 1990s (the materialistic, shopping-addicted Golden Age of HFCA). In one story, a butch named Flash arrives to pick Lesléa up and take her out to dinner. Flash politely tells Lesléa that she looks nice. “The average femme would have taken that to be a compliment,” Lesléa dishes. “But this high-maintenance femme hadn’t spent the last two weeks shopping for the perfect outfit and the last seven hours bathing, shaving, bleaching, filing, polishing, combing, brushing, drying, moussing, spritzing, spraying, and applying five pounds of makeup to have all her efforts summed up in one little four-letter word.” Flash’s flimsy compliment doesn’t satisfy Lesléa’s desires to be seen, appreciated, and worshiped, and so Lesléa starts from the bottom and works her way up, prompting Flash to compliment her shoes, her miniskirt, and finally her hair in a grand, shimmering pyramid of HFCA. But even as she performs satiation, Lesléa is insatiable. Her antics fail at getting her precisely what she wants from Flash, because there’s always something unsatisfying about getting what you want by asking for it. Lesléa’s desire glows from within the frame of her HFCA, distilled and exposed and unmet. Can I Come Inside, my high-femme sex game, deals primarily with unmet, outsourced, and circumnavigated desire. In Females (2019), trans lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu argues that femaleness is a universal, existential condition rather than a gender or a sex — a condition of being and of consciousness that involves letting others do our desiring for us. At stake in Can I Come Inside, as well as in HFCA at large, is a femaleness that both craves and rebels against its tendency to outsource desire. In playing Can I Come Inside, I, like Lesléa, ask Tess to do my desiring for me, and Tess in turn defers her desire to me: the game is strictly my desire, one that she insists she does not share. Even though it mandates a performance of aggressive desire from Tess, there’s no doubt that Can I Come Inside is about my desire; it’s my game; I make the rules."

-- An excerpt from "High Femme Camp Antics," an essay written by Jenny Fran Davis. (Emphasis in bold my own.)

[guitarspearmybeloved]

Why did she fall for him?

She racked her brain despite her stubborn pride and embarrassment

Angels shouldn't fall in love.

Weren't they beyond this? Didn't they ascend to escape Earth's sinful emotions?

But the longer she thought, the more she saw it in him

A long forgotten gentleness hiding deep below the surface

She can see it when his beautiful golden wings brush against hers

Or when he thinks he's alone he'll bring out his old acoustic guitar

when the stars shine extra bright on clear nights

And trembling ages old lullabies fall from his lips

With no hesitation, his heart remembers softly singing his countless children to sleep

[tendermimi]

excerpt from the last poem ‘I grant you refuge’ by Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada before she was martyred by an israeli air strike on the twentieth of october, translated by Huda Fakhreddine

[doll-elvis]

“Although he seemed sound asleep, he must have felt my eyes on him, because suddenly, he rolled onto his stomach and threw his arm over me. I held my breath, keeping perfectly still, afraid I might rouse him, and take away my opportunity to lie there memorizing every single thing about his face, things like the way his thick dark lashes curled up at the tips, and the softness of his mouth, relaxed with sleep, childlike, almost angelic. I ran my eyes across his exposed back and shoulder, the skin so satiny it seemed to glow. The word “supernatural” occurred to me…”

the imagery in this 😭

(excerpt from “Hollywood lights, Nashville Nights” by Diana Goodman)

[incorrect-primarchs-quotes]

[derangedrhythms]

and the nature of the angels went unexplained, 

Anne Sexton, Live or Die; from ‘Consorting With Angels’

[oresti-s]

Between Angels, Stephen Dunn.

[feral-ballad]

Rose Ausländer, tr. Eavan Boland, from After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets; "My Nightingale"

[Text ID: "Here she was— / half an angel and half humankind—"]

[philosophors]

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”

— Maya Angelou

[azfellandco]

I’ve never moved on from here, if we’re being honest.

[howifeltabouthim]

Angels weren't so different from the fairies, at the end of the day they were all of them monsters. They would do well to leave us humans alone.

Lev Grossman, from The Bright Sword

[soircieres]

— Maya Angelou, ‘Late October’.

[alliseaisfandom]

Random song association time

HuskerDust. Specifically Angel's pov.

You know I'm right.