• 6 days ago
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In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life. In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter. I could have nodded, I could have smiled without showing my teeth. In some small way I could have worldlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.

— Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

  • 1 week ago
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(Source: 7sobm)

  • 2 weeks ago
  • 176986

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

— Ada Límon

  • 3 weeks ago
  • 2
Our bodies are a sign that time once made
its home in us, we are connected to time
the way the earth wears the orbit of the moon,
and light is how time communicates, feeling
is memory distilled to its purest form:
don’t you remember how the evening
wouldn’t let go of all that blue, how your tongue
woke salt from its sleep? In the space made sacred
by bone and steel, does the cold still offend you,
what is the velocity of silence,
does your night correspond to our night,
are we foreign now, do the things we touch
turn to light, and is this how we feel
the presence of time, not by remembering
but by touching? In a dream you found
your mother’s house, you stood by the door
but she couldn’t let you in, the dream
resisted you. You were never at home
in the body, it’s weighed with longing,
its needs too soon extinct. You lit a candle
across the water until the wind gave up
and let you pass: by mere insistence
you could have saved the world. No one
saw you, no one pulled you out of the sulfur,
but the dying still walk miles to it,
in their minds already healed. You’ve taken
everything that’s failed, dream, memory,
the soul displaced from its ecliptic,
into a kind of heaven, a sovereign
indifference. You entered it with your body
all on fire. Dusk was nesting in winter’s trees.
The hours burned away. Nothing was spared.

— Eric Gamalinda, “Burning the Body, after Tarkovsky”

(Source: metaphorformetaphor)

  • 3 weeks ago
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