Fatima Aamer Bilal, Excerpt From Moony Moonless Sky’s ‘i Am An Observer, But Not By Choice.’

btw archive dot org is SUCH a treasury when it comes to out-of-print poetry anthologies… i am having the time of my life, truly ❣️

Emily L., Marguerite Duras // Bertrand Russell, What Desires are Politically Important? // Octavio Paz, "The House of Glances" // Mitski—Francis Forever // Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities // VIVINOS and QMENG, Alien Stage (Round 6) // Bryan Fuller, Hannibal (2013) // Richard Siken, "Little Monster" // Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays // Mitski—I Bet on Losing Dogs

Literary history that happened on 30 September 

In another universe, things fell into place.

All the light we cannot see

Some of my fav passages ♡

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country. The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

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What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.

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Marie-Laure listens to honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home.

How do they know what parts to play, those little bees _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

She holds out a hand, and sparrows land one by one on her arms, and she tucks each one into her coat. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain in pieces back to the earth.

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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

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To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.

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But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.

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We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

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“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

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That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

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“I am only alive because I have not yet died.” 

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“How are you?” Oh I’m fine just thinking about Don McLean’s American Pie. And Don McLean’s Vincent. And Don McLean’s Sister Fatima. And Don McLean’s Winterwood. And Don McLean’s Wonderful Baby. And Don McLean’s Crying in the Chapel. And Do

Ada Limón, "Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds" // SouthFloridaReporter.com // Wikipedia, "Baking Powder" // Caroline McCaughey (AARP), "8 Big Inventions Inspired by Love" // Wikipedia, "Band-Aid" // Jim Walsh, "What's the love story behind Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers?" // NYFA, "The History of Drive-In Movie Theaters" // Caroline McCaughey, ibid. // Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House

e.e. cummings, from “in time of daffodils(who know” (in 95 Poems), Complete Poems: 1904-1962

[Text ID: “In time of daffodils(who know the goal of living is to grow)”]

This isn't how life is supposed to feel

irsshawty on Pinterest / I Saw The TV Glow / internetfavorite on Pinterest / kiyogakukai on Pinterest / Spotify on Pinterest / ladycranes on Pinterest / micheallasboard on Pinterest / Ryan O'Connell / norhanelhadry474 on Pinterest / @inanotherunivrse on Tumblr / ??? / Charles Wright, Scar Tissue in "Scar Tissue" / Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna / Priyer on Pinterest / vangore on X / perfumebathing on Instagram / marvinandrea89 on Pinterest / @hannahlockillustration on Tumblr / stickybaby on We Heart It / lesedimorapeli25 on Pinterest / Jnkskxm on Pinterest / Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation / Fernando Pessoa, "English Song", A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems / Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness / MrsandMrStyles on Pinterest / Chuck Palahniuk / justgiveittime on Pinterest / Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 6: 1955-1966 / Mary Macdonald, romanticizeaquietlife on Pinterest / Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl /

I accidentally deleted my credits while creating this & struggled to find the original creators again as I had already downloaded all of this content. Some of the credits are towards the original creators, but some are just references to where I was able to find the content after deleting my original credits. Please feel free to correct any of my credits if you see one that is incorrect 🫶🏼