Salting Wounds With Poetry, And Counting Losses With A Pen That’s Run Dry. Tomorrow Will Be One Year

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• “If Moses had seen the way my friend’s face blushes when he’s drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man” (rabbi yehuda al-harizi/judah ben solomon harizi, book of taḥkemoni iirc)

• “The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.” ( Mikko Harvey, from “For M,” Foundry)

• I want to stay on the back porch / while the world tilts / toward sleep, until what I love /misses me, and calls me in. (Dorianne Laux, from “On the Back Porch,” Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems )

• “I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now.” (Tennessee Williams, from a letter to Donald Windham)

•I cannot write about Damascus, without the jasmine climbing on my fingers. I cannot say Her name, without my mouth getting overcrowded with apricot juice, blackberries and quince” (Nizar Qabbani, A Green Lantern on Damascus’ Door)

• “Put your heart in it” “My heart’s with you. I don’t have it anymore” (Dear Ex, 2018)

• "Why did you call me at the office today?” “I had nothing to do. I wanted to hear your voice.” (In The Mood For Love, 2000)

• I’ve dreamt about you nearly every night this week (Arctic Monkeys)

• This tweet

• Sharing a bubble bath on a rainy day, Santa Cruz, February 2015.

• Chungking Express (1994)

“You are not real. You are a dream of a dream.”

— Henry Miller, from Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters Of Henry Miller to Brenda Venus (via violentwavesofemotion)

I don’t believe that the love between eva and I is coincidence. in this big, big universe, we happened to be in the same classroom. she was the first person to teach me that I did not need to change in order to be loved and is quite literally the definition of a boundless, unconditional love. I’m very lucky. I think some sort of divine power sent her to me. how her smile still calms me, a year later. how beautiful and brimming with life she is. thank you evka. I’m not sure you’ll ever read this but you have my heart.

Let it Snow (2019)

see, I turn silent during sex. my voice buries itself in my throat like a messy bloodclot. how could I be anything other than passive anyway? anything other than silent? my abuser carries my voice around like his souvenir, has split my body in two and took one half with him. left me with skin I don’t recognise, a body that still mistakes warmth for war. i turn silent during sex. let his hands paint orchids on my neck, let his fingers climb up me in search of my secrets, let his body into mine until I have nowhere to put the bad memories. this body isn’t mine. I don’t think it ever will be.

borrowed time, green eyes and sunshine. oh how these river currents move like your body on top of mine. like the quiet disappointment of your wandering eye. how i could live, die and breathe in this moment, experience eighty years of heaven and hell with you. the sun on my skin feels like a kiss. steady, lover. stay with me through the summer.

you move & the wind moves with you, something honey, something bruised— in the way you chew on your bottom lip. nervous habit; delayed reaction. how in summer the world feels like a mirage of itself. hands that chain themselves to anything that refuses to let go: a leech, or brown muck. your teeth (grazing) the inside of my elbow. something damn frustrating about the way you give yourself up (to anything that’s foolish enough to take you) i.e the sea, the coast, where your shoulders meet, the leylines of your veins. & picture me humbly, please. picture me in evenings & earthly tones, only. & do not hold your breath when i go, slip. out the back door—silhouetted feline; precipitous, or better yet. picture (you), standing barefoot in the tall grass, picture the curve of your neck in malnourished light, & a puncture wound, in the now negative (space) you found me in: a flower bed emptied; the sun bleached out. — oh all i ever wanted / was a life in your shape // mitski

Leonard Cohen, from Parasites of Heaven

what if he loves her the way he refused to love me?

Why didn’t you leave, my mother and my friends and his friends asked me and I wish I could give them all an answer because it’s been months and I’m still not too sure. I can’t really work it out because it’s not like he ever hit me. In fact- maybe it was my fault, the way I swallowed the words that spilled over the floor until I was sick. I carefully clipped admissions of pain into jokes about how love feels like drowning, whispered softly to my friends, “so fucked up” as if this wasn’t the life I was living. I walked around with my jaw clenched because he was safe enough, right? And it’s not like yelling or insults ever killed anyone (it is bad to have this body. it takes up too much space.) I heard someone call me “emotionally delicate” and I would cry but there isn’t really anything to cry about. that’s the joke of it. so what that he said he’d make me do it even if I didn’t want to? so what he’d recoil when I argued and say “you’re so annoying when you panic”. There was nothing beautiful there, nothing soft. No red flags, no warning signs- just an empty carcass and dirt. My heart like a rotten peach (how it is all so unbearable). He has a new girlfriend now and they kiss and hold hands and something inside me breaks (maybe she was soft in ways I never was, maybe it was always me). Is this how love works? Was it always supposed to be this way?

I’m back in a stairwell. blue faced and weak

and weak

and weak.

It isn’t getting easier.

Lover, I know I’m such an excessive woman. I bleed so many emotions, each as destructive as the last. I breathe in love and exhale anxiety, infecting everything around me with paranoia and insecurity. I bleed scarlet angry and drink bluesy sadness, so much pain and turmoil, so much misplaced passion.

It must be so overwhelming to be mine, must be like loving a charred forest that doesn’t know how to trust the sun again, mistakes warmth for destruction. Lover, please leave if you find yourself crumbling under the weight of all that has broken me. I know I’m too much and that I’ve painted the inside of your heart in splatters of ugly colours, regurgitated trauma.

But you say no. You tell my ghosts that if they’re staying, then that they’d better make room. You hold me until I am strong enough to walk again, kiss me until all the loss tastes like strength. Tell me that the inside of your heart is a masterpiece now, all those colours look so pretty. You hold up a mirror to it and say look, how can all this look anything less but human.

A love so unconditional, so relentless in its support. How lucky I am, lover, to call you my own.

coffee, the sunrise and the buildings awash in the light of a new morning all around me. how lovely is it to be alive. to experience all this busyness and splendour. how the clouds whisper good morning and the heavens themselves shine through each crack in the sky. how the sun calls my body to wake. how the birds tell me today is a new day and aren’t there just endless possibilities. the promise of a new sunrise makes me so glad I’m still alive.