Reminder

If you follow Selmers to the poetry society meeting in Night In The Woods, this is her poem. I loved it and the themes of the game, and wanted to use it as practice to see if i can control the way readers ‘hear’ the words through images.

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Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Instructions for Traveling West”

you spent hours in libraries and in art supply stores trying to absorb the artist tips from books your parents didn't want to buy you. on each page of every "how to draw" is a version of the same four things: this is how you shade a sphere. this is how you shade a cone.

this is what a man looks like. he is hard and angular and jutting. his chest narrows a triangle down to his sharp hip and long legs. his jawbone is a square. he is powerful, imposing, his hands are big and meaty. he is a leader.

this is what a woman looks like. she is soft and her hands tuck her long hair back behind a delicate ear. she is big-eyed and round (but not too round, she is skinny, here is the faint sketch of her abs showing), she is smaller and lighter and pretty. she has thick black lashes and her tits do not come with a massive ribcage to offset the weight we put on her - she has curves, but they are impossibly slim without giving her backache trouble. there is a large red hourglass outlined on top of her figure, the way there is a triangle outlined on top of the man. her face is a heart-shape, and her lips are pouting.

here is how you draw the woman and the man together. the man should be in action shots. the woman's ass should be in action shots. she should fit against the man to compliment his negative space - she should slot into his shadow so when they hug, they become one uniform space. here is how all the other artists have done it, see how good it looks when the man (angles, fire, passion, action) and the woman (roundness, water, emotion, supplication) complement each other? he begins the sentence, she is his ending.

do you want to kiss another girl? that is round-to-round. that is fitting the wire into the wrong socket! how would the faces look together? a single silhouette you sketch and then hide, scribbling over it.

do you want to look like a girl? by sheer genetic happenstance, you absolutely don't look like that, and you never have. you don't look like a man, either, though, do you. you don't feel like you truly belong to either gender, but there is not a "neutral/fluid" drawing in the book. there is male (triangle) or female (hourglass).

but you have a square jaw and square hands and "masculine" proportions. but you have curves and roundness and full lips and "feminine" features. someone online says, definitively, that any form of gender noncompliance is "a mental illness." this comment has over one thousand likes from people who agree.

here is how you shade a square. none of the clothes at the store look good on you, you always somehow feel like you're wearing a weird kind of costume. here is how you shade a sphere. your friend's mother calls the school because she's horrified you're in the same changing room. here is the neutral body figure: it is a wooden man. technically the wooden man is genderless, but that is because masculinity is the default, and everyone calls the figure "a wooden man." you must be small and posable and skinny and featureless, then you can be masculine enough to not have gender.

here is how to draw a person. begin with some shapes. choose the right shapes to get that person's gender correct. do not kiss her. shade in short, sharp lines.

when she laughs, look away.

just remembered this old clickhole video i used to be obsessed with

I think I was just born with something dark and ugly inside of me. Always waiting to be found out.

planetarium - adrienne rich/@twoheadedfawnn/ugly, bitter, and true - suzanne rivecca/a burning hill - mitski/a hora da estrela- clarice lispector/ @100493503004422/sharp objects - gillian flynn

#203

It just kept haunting.

Vying for a steely, totalitarian grasp on my thoughts,

Snatching with it’s thick greedy fingers at fragments of tranquility,

Lurking in every shadowed alleyway of my subconscious.

I eventually concluded that I needed to settle this with a confrontation.

The next time it tried to influence my thinking, I asked,

“Why are you here? What do you want?”

It rung it's hands for a moment, silent.

The first time, it replied “To change you.”

I tried to talk into it every attack.

It grew more anxious every time I asked, as if no one took the time to confer with it.

Its answers became more telling

“So you will suffer for what you've done.”

“You need to remember what a miserable creature you are.”

“I will not leave your side. I am what you deserve.”

It is extremely insistent.

But I know it will not retain this power forever.

I will continue to note its arrival.

Someday, I hope that it will be a fleeting, inconsequential specter.

But today isn’t someday I suppose.

We all live with demons.

Sadly, this isn’t the first or last.

*

peopleiveloved

over and over, by me

i was having thoughts so i made a poem about them