When Kafka Said ‘you Wouldn’t Believe The Kind Of Person I Could Become If You Wanted It’ And When

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?

1. bathe by hailaker

2. art by maggie stephenson

3. ocean vuong, night sky with exit wounds

4. art by charlotte ager

5. banana yoshimoto, goodbye tsugumi

oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too. 

one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.

I am asking you to endure it.

when lorde said “i knew that teenagers sparkled. i knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting. since 13 i’ve spent my life building this giant teenage museum, mausoleum maybe, dutifully wolfishly writing every moment down, and repeating it all back like folklore. and now there isn’t any more of it.”

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)

yena sharma purmasir

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

unfriendly reminder that demisexuality and demiromanticism are both very real orientations 

same with greysexuality and greyromanticism

same with every single one of the different ace- and arospec orientations that exist

and if you even fucking try to fuck w any of my aspec sibs on this

I. WILL. FUCK. YOU. UP

it astounds me even until now how i can come to this blog and go with a piece of my soul back in place. i was wondering if you had any poems on 'ghosts' and their 'haunting' people and places, romantic or otherwise. there is a ghost, you see, and she haunts me even though i know her to be alive and well. i am unsure of which terrifies me more: her being in and out of my reach or my hope that i too am her ghost.

so these are not all poems, but:

“I think ghosts are memory—memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together. Ghosts are that which return and return and return. The body has its own hauntings, too: phantom limb sensation, organ transfer memory, the traumatic self. And others.”

— Shastra Deo, interviewed by Sumudu Samarawickrama in Liminal Mag 

— Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

“But the fall—the falling / of it / even after it’s done—”

— Jorie Graham, from Overlord: Poems; “Omaha (Lowest Tide, Coefficient 105, Full Moon)”

— Jessie Lynn McMains, To Be Haunted

— Dorothy Allison, from Boston, Massachusetts (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983)

“it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing / to shy from, this is not / nostalgia, you must look at it,”

— Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Gently, Though, Gentle”

— Nikki Giovanni, from “[Untitled]”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

— Adonis, from Selected Poems; “A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

—James Baldwin, from Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems; “Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico)”