Intangible - Madisen Kuhn

i do it all for you, kid

1. @trainthief x 2. finalfanjessi x 3. me 4. x 5. @plumslices x 6. me 7. jessica czapalski x 8. daksdays x 9. me 10. rina sawayama, phantom

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

What the Dragon Said: a Love Story

by Catherynne M. Valente

So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair      and he says why the long tale?                  HAR HAR BUDDY says the dragon                  FUCK YOU. The dragon’s a classic the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats take in those Christmas colors, those impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath, comes standard with a heap of rubylust goldhuddled treasure.                  Go ahead.                  Kick the tires, boy.                  See how she rides. Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds roll off her back like dandruff. Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin? I’d rather be a unicorn.                  Always thought that was the better gig. Everyone thinks you’re innocent. Everyone calls you pure. And the girls aren’t afraid they come right up with their little hands out for you to sniff like you’re a puppy and they’re gonna take you home. They let you put your head right in their laps.                  But nobody on this earth ever got what they wanted. Now I know what you came for. You want my body. To hang it up on a nail over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica who lays her head in your lap look how much it takes to make me feel like a man.                  We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal shit right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been called up. This is the big game. You don’t have to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers like your monkey bravado can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet and lose. You’ve got nothing I want. Here’s something I bet you don’t know:      every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies.                  Something about seeing and being seen                  something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem                  I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.                  That last blockbuster took out a whole family                  of Bhutan thunder dragons living in Latvia the fumes of their cleargas hoard hanging on their beards like blue ghosts. A dragon’s gotta get zen                  with ephemerality. You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather with butcher’s chalk: cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue, chuck, chops, brisket, roast.                  I dig it, I do. I want to eat everything, too. When I look at the world      I see a table. All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales, bankers and Buddha statues the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins                  if you let me swallow you whole                  I’ll call you whatever you want. Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea                  Don’t they know they’d be safer                  inside me? I could be big for them      I could hold them all My belly could be a city      where everyone was so loved they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be the hyperreal post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.      I could eat them      and feed them      and eat them      and feed them. This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn. Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood and they don’t burn up like comets with love that tastes like starving to death.      And you, with your standup comedy knightliness, covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo, you can’t begin to think through      what it takes to fill up a body like this. It takes everything pretty and everything true      and you stick yourself in a cave because your want is bigger than you. I just want to be the size of a galaxy so I can eat all the stars and gas giants without them noticing and getting upset. Is that so bad?                  Isn’t that what love looks like?                  Isn’t that what you want, too? I’ll make you a deal.      Come close up stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself the goldpile of my body      Close enough to smell everything you’ll never be. Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing is it a snake that eats her tail and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth anyway? Everyone knows poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel like you’re just a story someone is telling about someone like you?                  I get that. I get you. You and me we could fit inside each other. It’s not nihilism if there’s really no point to anything. I have a secret down in the deep of my dark. All those other kids who wanted me to call them paladins, warriors, saints, whose swords had names, whose bodies were perfect as moonlight      they’ve set up a township near my liver had babies with the maidens they didn’t save      invented electric lightbulbs      thought up new holidays.                              You can have my body                              just like you wanted. Or you can keep on fighting dragons writing dragons fighting dragons re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch you mammals always win.                  But hey, hush, come on. Quit now. You’ll never fix that line.                  I have a forgiveness in me                  the size of eons                  and if a dragon’s body is big enough                  it just looks like the world.                                                          Did you know the earth used to have two moons?

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.”

i exist, i exist, i exist

kačka chmelíková // holly warburton // ? // image from pinterest // letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

are there any poems you have on home, if its ok to ask? i feel homesick for a home beyond my reach and thought i could come to you.

“I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

“it’s as if I had to go back home on foot, alone, barefoot not knowing where far away, everybody else went long ago”

— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic)

“[ON LOSING LOVE]: This is the model I propose. You are arriving home and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart shaped.”

— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters

— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“‘I’m homesick all the time,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I just don’t know where home is. There’s this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it’s like chasing the moon - just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again.”

— Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon 

“Wickedness has leaked into the home I made, / and I want to burn it down. Sister, tell me / how you stand the murderous fury. You there / still singing, I crave demolishing, to eat / explosives.”

— Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “Home Fires”

“At the core of all sighs is a name, a stone from the body’s last lost home.”

— Karen Solie, from “Days Inn,” Short Haul Engine

“To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad?”

— Chen Chen, from “Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet”

“Feeling what we all feel: home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.”

— Richard Blanco, from “Mexican Almuerzo in New England”

— Ross Gay, from Bringing the Shovel Down; “Because”

“I want to ask was there ever one / moment when all of it relented, / when rain and ocean and their own / sense of home were revealed to them / as one and the same?”

— Eavan Boland, from In a Time of Violence

“I: Why not take the shorter way home. HT: There is no shorter way home.”

— Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours; “Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)”

this one really gets me bestie

(meditations in an emrgency, cameron awkward-rich)

“I am young, and, at last, life is not so dark and so painful. The sun shines, and the moon is calm.”

— Takuboku Ishikawa, from “Romaji Diary & Sad Toys,” published c. 1985

“Well, of course I’ve tried lavender. And pulling my memory out, ribbonlike and dripping. And shrieking into my pillow. And writing the poems. And making more friends. And baking warm brown cookies. And therapy. And intimacy. And pictures of rainbows. And all of the movies about lovers and the terrible things they do to each other. And watching the ones in other languages. And leaving the subtitles off. And listening to the language. And forgetting my name. And feeling the dirt on my skin. And screaming in the shower. And changing my shampoo. And living alone. And cutting my hair. And buying a turtle. And petting the cat. And traveling. And writing more poems. And touching a different body. And digging a grave. And digging a grave. Of course, I’ve tried it. Of course I have.”

— september is a weary month, yasmin belkhyr

When you’re an artist, it’s because there’s something inside you that you can’t keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jeté, or a stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it’s always the same. It’s the emotion there isn’t a word for. The feeling that’s too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable—people who are content—they don’t create art.

Jodi Picoult, from The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine, 2020)