Beneath the skies of Csilla, separation is all too painful to bear –  Ivant keeps the memories as tokens, dissecting them for signs, as if anything has escaped his notice before. 

I don’t like the idea of separation, he’d told Thrawn so before his departure; he felt severed from all he knew. (Good day, Lieutenant Vanto – the indifference stings, even though in hindsight Ivant knows – Ivant hopes he was mistaken).

Ivant is Thrawn’s legacy, his gift to the Ascendancy, the problem is Ivant is not satisfied with just being that.

And if Ivant needs to throw his career into the metaphorical depths of Mustafar to get Thrawn back, well, the ‘greater good’ has always been more of Thrawn’s thing than his own.

Ivant is only human, after all.

—bisections of stars; scene vii(x) || Eliot C.||☕||

we all want our deaths to mean something, however small, to someone to anyone. but the universe is so vast, our lives are not even dust. the sheer scale of what surrounds us is sometimes beyond what we can even comprehend. sometimes, if you try to understand it all you go mad. then death follows. 

no one remembers the death of mad men. 

-excerpt from The Novel WIP

Loneliness makes for a constant companion, my fingers tangled with their — wishing for a shift in the stars, an end to this companionship and the arrival of

A thing that does not have a name when it takes root in my mind. I dream of the open highways and the twisting trees that grow wild alongside. I dream of driving down those roads with

The static of broken radio stations punctuating the silences between us.

so: another portal-fantasy. another / anywhere-but-here, tripping over nothing / in the doorway. balance regained / only to look up in universes / tilted ninety degrees to the side, / the kind where the skies are made / of white jaws sheared wide, teeth planted / tight in the dirt. every skeleton / grown from monster to mansion. say / you want to stay here, / and it’ll mean you can’t. / but if you look a little closer / at the mirror before you / maybe the painted ocean at the back of the room / will spill from its frame, sea-glass / staining the floorboards, / the seafoam-blood of little lost merfolk / tugging you away again. or: if you / touch it just right, / a crack in a wall / can draw you in, mistlike. miss / the bottom step on the staircase / and you’ll land no time later / in some time unknown, on the mushroom-bed / of a faery underland. tell me / the story again. i promise / i remember / how to listen. there’s a reason why / our version of i love you / always sounded more / like run away with me.

—q.l.

someone somewhere is singing of love found in dreams
instead of under the sun. love as a honey-sweet smile
you’d only recognize if you went back to sleep. maybe
somewhere else, the moon skims a featherweight palm

over the snow, leaves a shadow-shape to say it’s sorry,
to tell you this could’ve been a better story if you hadn’t
looked so closely, but if you like, you can mourn the sunset 

for lack of anything better to blame. keep your hands 
folded together, tucked into pockets as if they’re endless 
as fog, running fingertips over old paper until it plumes
into fragments joined only by dust. memory breathes 
in shades of lavender, colours that know what they hold 
can never be said out loud. and maybe by morning

you can fall asleep again, but these woods still won’t be
large enough to get lost in. you’ll always be coiled up 
at the back of your throat.

—q.l.

the little mermaid

there is a girl and i am kissing her before the closed door to my family home and the peephole is dark with a pupil. my mouth gapes open like in death so she puts her tongue in it, the hook in fish-mouth. her hands slip beneath my shirt, the butcher’s knife, and she peels away the bones of my spine until i am nothing but sea foam in her palms. the cavern of her mouth, wide as a maw of a lonely whale, swallows me whole. when my mother opens the door she sees only the sea witch. 

inspired by van gogh’s wheatfield with crows

i am tired of writing poetry, and of you thinking it’s about you. the sun, i say, and you think it’s a metaphor for the way the scorn hangs from the corner of your lips. if i burn my feet because i ran barefoot on the path it is because you’d touched me when i had not wanted to be touched. the forked tongue is yours. the cleft feet, those are yours too. that metaphor about seabirds is a poor imitation of the time you’d brought me to the cinema and left the tickets at home. i am tired of your misreading. you are not beautiful in metaphor or hideous in parodied imagery. if i wrote about you i would speak only of your hands and the bruises, not of flowers that bloomed. if i wrote about you i would say only that the sun did not set nor rise, that being with you was a terrible stasis. i would not mention the curved neck of a great blue heron or the dead metaphor of a whale’s skeleton, i would not talk of floods when all you gave me was silence.

disembodiment is loss, you used to say, as your hand circled my wrist like the world’s most beautiful shackle. it is the loss of function, the acute feeling of absence, your fingers graze the side of my neck where the veins are the closest to the sun. we go to a museum that displays the fragments of hands, and you say, somewhere, the rest of the sculpture must be hurting, and i read the plaque and tell you that there is no rest, the hand is the sculpture. you cannot understand it. it has to come from somewhere, you insist, and your arm traps mine in a noose.

i understand it now — disembodiment. it is not about absence, about the loss of meaning or the gush of blood. i see disembodiment and it is the way i no longer love you; i cannot be kept the same way that fog cannot be caught, the same way that sunlight fills the sky, limitless. i am the ocean, always in motion, slipping through cupped palms.

“we are designed for hurt,” i said to him one afternoon on his couch, and he asked, “do i hurt you?” and i showed him the divots his fingers left on my wrist where they had felt for my pulse. “where else,” he said, “where else did i hurt you” and i turned my cheek so he could see the side that i was hiding under the sun, the side that has little crescent scars from the graze of his nails. “is it just my hands” he said next and i rolled up my sleeves to show him the scabbed burns he left with his lips. “but these are old wounds” he said, “do they still hurt?” and i unbuttoned my shirt to show him the exit wound over my heart. he leaned in and his eyes were a live wire over my ribs, and he pointed to the clumsy stitches i had made and said, “you did this to yourself.” 

—zhen;ko-fi

cosmic expansionby@horationed

the pacific ocean is 165.2 square miles by @/horationed

midlife crisis at seventeen by @/horationed

cw // allusions to religion

on misplaced faith by @/horationed

i want you to read this poem by @/horationed

there is something about the way the sea looks this sunrise that makes me want to be loud. the waters have receded like a failing army and the exposed sand is sticky like glutinous rice. there is a tidal wave of rage rising in me and it has nowhere to go so i want it to go into the ocean. why won’t you scream, i ask, where are your storms, i want to see them tear the trees and the tents and the benches and the paths apart. i sneer at the culling complacency of reflected blue and i want it to snarl back. i want a tsunami, i want a death toll taller than these gallows of mine. there is a hurricane on the tip of my tongue and it tastes like salt and the bitterness of pesticide and i am filled with a plague. the pestilence in me rises and rises and rises and i am drowning in a mouth.

i want a storm, i want to be filled by the ocean and be pulled apart by the currents. i want to be thrown like a lover against the bedrock; let me be embraced by skeletal sailors. i would be bloody and beautiful on the outcroppings, strewn like a broken pearl necklace. i want the jagged teeth of great white sharks like hickeys on my skin. i want the plunge, i want the breathlessness, i want to bleed into the deep and let the salt cleanse the gulf of my wounds.

—when you soak an open wound in the ocean sometimes it heals and sometimes it develops into an infection by kyouka | @horationed

is it still belonging if only half can stayby@horationed

my grandfather tells me he isn’t afraid of deathby@horationed

corpse caringby@horationed