Them: You Should Have Sex At Least Once Just To Try It

oliver baez bendorf “bone dust” // “you up?” rachelle toarmino // “vocabulary” bao phi // svetlana alexievich “secondhand time”(trans. bela shayevich) // har alluri “ancestral memory” // céline sciamma on portrait of a lady on fire // “the glass essay” anne carson

i am holding hands with a girl at the pet store. i love how her voice changes when she speaks to different animals. round and bubbly for the angelfish, high and breathy for the calico kittens, sonorous and slithery for the python. she loves them all, even the great hairy tarantula that makes me cringe. 

i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t.

“are you two… together?”

this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words. 

“there are children here, you know.” 

in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon. 

i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with.

even with this, there is nowhere i would rather be than holding hands with her in a pet store, with her voice like rain on a hot day, her peach lips blowing kisses for fish, her grip tightening as if to say “i dare you to take this away from me.”

mary oliver I’ll be honest I have not endured loneliness with grace

What are some of your favorite poems/pieces of writing?

general disclaimer that im much less well-read as my carefully curated internet persona might lead on... but these are some pieces of writing that make up the mycelium network of my mind’s undergrowth:

tim riggins speaks of waterfalls - nico alvarado

as from a quiver of arrows - carl phillips 

what the dragon said: a love story - c. valente

hunting season - steven chung

yes, think - ruth stone

from blossom - li-young lee

psalm - dorianne laux

sleeping in hte forest - mary oliver

percy wakes me (fourteen) - mary oliver

here there are blueberries - mary szybist

try to praise the mutilated world - adam zagajewski

de profundis - christina rosetti

new bones - lucille clifton

morning love poem - tara skurtu

forfeiting my mystique - kaveh akbar

that kind of good - natalie wee

the mower - philip larkin

valentine - carol ann duffy

happiness from paul schmidtberger’s design flaws of the human condition

we ate the birds - margaret atwood

i want to tell you yes - kallie falandays

ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt - ross gay

not the beloved from anne carson’s erso the bittersweet

after the movie - marie howe

accident report in the tall, tall weeds - ada limón

in tennessee i found a firefly - mary szybist

when i put my hands on your body - david wojnarowicz

the mystery of grocery carts - john olson

your night is of lilac - mahmoud darwish

a dead thing that, in dying, feeds the living - donika kelly

please read - mary ruefle

dudes, we did not go through the hassle of getting these fake ids for this jukebox to not have any springsteen - hanif andurraquib

we lived happily during the war - ilya kaminsky

while the child sleeps - ilya kaminsky

the forgotten dialect of the heart - jack gilbert

what the living do - marie howe

eleven - sandra cisneros

revolutionary letter #4 - diane di prima

elegy for my sadness - chen chen

Li Shangyin, from When Will I be Home? (tr. by Kenneth Rexroth)

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947 - 1963

Okay, new cleaning strategy.

Bad at self-discipline, good at acts of love through service. So I'm gonna clean my house pretending it is the house of someone I love who's been too depressed to clean. She's gonna be so surprised.

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire