#thesuburbanghosts

[fermentingferns]

Poetry comes from pain, this is something we all know. Don’t tell me there are lots of poems about beautiful things and love, because the only people who really turn those things into pure magic on paper are the ones who were aching before they found them. Poetry comes from being submerged, the shuddering gasp as you break the surface. Maybe you go under again, maybe you don’t. Who knows how long you’ll be lost before you can write again. Some people spend their whole lives down there, surfacing like whales. I’m sure Charles Bukowski was a whale.

[ashandabstraction]

a study in mourning | kmp

[csoip]

love her. love her. love her.

you are waiting in between-

ans Meer

to the sea.

i learned how to speak seven languages by the time i was young. they were not what i thought they should be.

in each one, the word for world had no other meaning.

der Welt, mein Herz is a terrible terrible place.

is this why we flee? на море to the ocean, to the sea?

when i said language, i did not mean русская or deutsch or română; i meant a different sort of words.

how to show fear and regret and to speak angrily, with no remorse.

crying long hours, how you say, like the rainstorm.

there is no native language for grief because we are all fluent speakers.

there is a grammar for happiness that must be learned.

when i was smaller then, not of body but mind, i asked how you knew it was really the sea.

how it was not simply the red overwhelming everything else you saw.

i do not think i was really asking about the sea.

even know i do not know if the sea is what i mean when i say it is what we are all seeking.

weltzsmurch we are all world weary.

perhaps the sea is red because everything else is blue.

and the question still remains- if i say happiness in one language will you understand the meaning in another?

please understand i mean no harm.

für mein love, my love, my love, the sea my love, my dragoste my love, to see my love my love my love, is red.

in a place between words we cannot communicate and somehow we are all waiting in between.

спасибо, there is a way to reach the ocean from here.

is there an ocean everywhere around us.

in my mind the sea is red and my mind the sea.

a language of neutral patterns, waves, timing and frequency.

i cannot seem to rid myself of the sea and the sea cannot rid myself of me.

from speaking in a manner of many words i have only learned this:

the word for world is weary of being used in such a small manner.

and we have yet to set out on our own infinite sea, the red one we wade through.

of cut down trees and men. in every language the word for hatred is spelled like knife in back, in throat, in heart you do not have.

hatred is the killing of something not your own.

a small body rests am Meer too tired to know the consequence.

we are the word for emptiness and conscience.

we the only word that matters.

the sea is red at our feet.

[softstained]

WISH YOU WERE HERE, by laetitia k.

all poems are eulogies, some more than others. here are four blackout poems from songs that meant the world, in a time that meant even more. my way of saying goodbye.

[alaskaisnothere]

if they call you a witch, then act like one. use your sorcery, your spells, your magic to seduce them and then leave them for dead. be a creature of the night and partner up with darkness, they will be so afraid. proving them right and proving them that you are something beyond their expectations will freak them out because there is nothing more terrifying for them than a witch in power.

giulswrites

[vicious-glitter]

Landscapes iii [a series] // Sunnie Lyca

[karmaalwayswins]

Writing Prompts: One Week Until Halloween!

1. “I don’t like horror stories.”

2. Two of the eyes in the paint shop mural keep looking at you.

3. A fifty foot high statue built out of human long bones.

4. Clockwork ghost.

5. The werewolf who plays piano at the vampire bar.

6. Sign language translation provided by a pair of severed hands. 

7. A hidden drawer filled with eight-fingered gloves. 

8. The clown’s new knife speaks to her at night. 

9. Zombie showdown at the high school.

10. “I don’t think that’s a costume...”

[fermentingferns]

I have cracked off, spilled out, chest

thudding on rocks, thigh(s)craping down the sides of trees. I am holding a hand the size

of a fat raspberry, and it belongs to a boy who needs me

but I am full of h o l e s a n d

I can’t keep him warm full full full full FULL of so, just so many holes. I think if I died, I’d still be tired.

Bone tired.

dry-heaving,

can’t feel from your elbows down tired.

it’s like looking at the sun when I hold him; staring at proof of your worst fear, but loving it so much that it splinters bone.

here is birth, life. grown inside me, and one day I am going to die.

-lynnea // mother who is sad

[ashandabstraction]

Transcend | kmp

Cover page of my Queer Lives & Knowledges zine from last Fall. Mixed media//linocut printed in acrylic paint over colored pencil, title lettering cut and pasted from various magazines. 

I may post the full zine if I can get a chance to scan the pages.

[csoip]

That strip of smoke coloured sky up there is the heaven of these people. -Jacob Riis and the heaven of these people is the heaven of those people from a different skyline. we look at the same gods with different eyes. that smoke-coloured, bare strip of sometimes light is beautiful when it is the only thing to look up to. when they dream, they dream of a sky painted like the sunset they know and the sunset they don’t, red-orange-blue with a grey haze on the horizon. when these people think of heaven they do not dream. they are tired. instead: heaven is the moment between breaths. heaven is the uninterrupted night of sleep. heaven is eight hours instead of twelve. heaven is all hands unhurt, all eyes not blind, a body on this earth that can contain their souls. heaven is their souls unbound in the closest thing they know to joy. joy is the little kindness, the way the light shines down. heaven is the light. that sky up there is not a strip it is the whole sky, it is the might of all the heavens all these heavenly bodies resting on the earth weighed down by all the dirt and fear they are the light trapped between the lines, they are looking at a different sky and seeing the same gods. they are learning heaven with their eyes open.

[softstained]

FUNERAL FLOWERS, by laetitia k.

[alaskaisnothere]

Sometimes being quiet gives you the answers you need. Sometimes the silence fills you more than words. We get bombarded by messages every day and we are pressured to speak louder, to let our voice be heard; but sometimes the silence wins every argument.

giulswrites

[vicious-glitter]

Landscapes i [a series] // Sunnie Lyca

[kaydeepoetry]

I am sleeping with the bathroom tiles and you are calling it adultery with the kind of conviction that can only be mustered by someone with purple and green stains on their knuckles.

The coffee table is in pieces on the floor so I pull shards of glass from my feet and apologise for the blood that goes crawling through the carpet.

The honey you keep tucked under your tongue has turned sour. When you leave me, I dream of bathing in pools of nectar. //LOVE PAST ITS BEST BEFORE//

-KD

[starsstarsmorestars-blog]

(i.               …and then there were none)

You ask him why, and he smiles helplessly at his hands.

“Well,” he says, “we all know how it ends but it’s my job to pretend, isn’t it?”

(ii.              bloodlust)

He punches the other guy right in his charming-handsome-perfect face, hard enough that there is a crack and red, and you see in her face that this has won him no favors. But his hand trembles before it punches again and you see in his wretched face that this (helpless) has nothing to do with her.

(iii.             Expired honey)

You see them together at her kitchen table. His words and smile are still sweet, but she turns away with a pretty-plain frown and does not look again. The warm sunlight feels stale. You shut the pages to drag out this last moment before the end (we all know how it ends), for his sake.

(iv.             nebraska)

He looks right at you, with a pained smile. “I’m leaving,” he says, but the hand holding his pack trembles and you both know he cannot.

(v.              Love letter to the void)

Dearest, his letter begins, and the ink pools black and pure and his hand is true, but you watch the dark shadow of his face and you (helpless) cannot breathe. He does not smile.

(vi.             black magic)

When you close the book, you cry. You try to start at the beginning but this (every) time he never, never smiles.

He does not look at you.

[fermentingferns]

she did have a sadness a fat bumblebee in her cheek the way a child hides candy from a sibling

she betrays herself laughs lemon wedge; bookmarks the tree on your forearm into memory