#useraya
the mirror used to call me a name-thief, so i
like to think death accuses you of stealing time.
it’s only fair. there was a picture-perfect ending
someone wanted for you, something satisfying,
the grand finale to a performance of a lifetime
long gone past its lease—but it won’t be yours.
i’ve got the stickiest fingers in this lightless city
and this story-end is going to be mine, whether
that’s luck or its dark-shaded reflection. and
you’ll have your turn, soon enough, fate’s dice
singing over the roar of flame. maybe someone
is telling this story. maybe someone’s making it
mean something. i don’t think you’ll apologize
if you have the chance. i don’t know if i’d forgive
you, even now. i only know i was never good
at picking out constellations, but when i drew
stars into jagged lines of lightning, hands cold
on rooftop tile, i always thought of you.
— 04.23.20 | q.l.
your hair is riverstone-smooth in my hands,
every braid i put in slipping out as easy
as my secrets do around you. do you remember
telling me you wanted to hinge your ribcage
open, just to check if the bones are hollow? wait
another season, at least. i filled them with seeds
that’ll only grow when no one’s looking. i know
patience won’t save us, but we were always good
at being quiet, and that’s almost the same,
our silence bright as the sun slipping underwater,
soft as the touch of moonlight on concrete,
promise-heavy as the storm-clouds gathering
overhead. so it goes. so you keep tending
the pearl-pale fire of the smile floating faceless
in the night-forest dark over your left shoulder.
there’s some strange desolation in knowing
our child-selves won’t recognize us when we
meet them again. but if you turn into flood
i’ll be the moon and say i led you there, say
i played puppetmaster with all your sightless
tides, so you can blame me if that’ll leave you
untouched by the weight of this world’s ending
and i’ll seal the sky closed with the last of the light.
—q.l. | for day #12 of @avolitorial’s napowrimo prompts
all of winter’s children learned early on
to feel fondest of the icefields that raised them
when they’re halfway through the thaw,
slick surfaces already broken but still holding
their shifting weight aloft, the capillary action
of cold circling up soft limbs like icicles
slackened into vines. this is to say: affection
as water halfway turned to mist, never quite
sustainable, never without the glass-glaze
of possession. the clouds are still frost-webbed
with the breath-sharp scent of the season,
still uncertain whether it’s allowed to end,
but all the air trapped underneath the ice
knows it was promised freedom long ago.
it just never asked if that meant disappearing.
—q.l. | for day #11 of @avolitorial’snapowrimo prompts
in a city named after obedience, peace is growing
at ground level. history pulls a white-petaled bloom
from the tired dirt, blows it clean and offers it to you
in wordless ritual. take it with both hands. ghosts
will spill out like pale coins, faces worn featureless
in the red light of sunrise. green loops of yarn
twist into hairpin flowers without your touch, soft
premonitions of burial. how many generations back
can you spin this story before you run out of names
to call? say it’s ancestral, and everyone will think
they understand, that all the tales have been shared,
that all the dead must be sleeping soundly. by late
evening, if your pulse stops threatening to outgrow
this body, press it into the hollow wrist of one of
the phantoms that haunt the top of the staircase
and you’ll turn their blood a little warmer, their voice
a little louder, hone the sharp-boned restlessness
they house: the same one sitting behind the mirror,
the same one smiling with your mouth.
—q.l. | for day #3 of @avolitorial’snapowrimo prompts
LATER, I’LL SMASH MY PHONE SCREEN & WE’LL ALMOST MISS OUR TRAIN
but for now we go grocery shopping & manage not to get lost
on a day so hot the mirages curl off the street & halo us all
in smoky light. when we get back i finish half a box of cereal
in one sitting & all anyone says is well, guess we should
get more of that. i plait tiny braids in brown-black hair. slip
tiny flowers into them. fingers trace the line of a double rainbow
as it loops through the clouds: this was meant to happen,
don’t you see? disney music plays on repeat in the furnace-heat
of an airless room & we have movie nights with all of us
tucked onto the same sagging futon, sweat-slick vinyl sucking
at bare skin. would you walk away from someone you loved
if it meant you both could live forever? & maybe my old answer
would have been yes. but now love is two a.m. texts saying
i can see your lights on, go to sleep. two p.m. texts saying come over,
we’re all napping together. sitting cross-legged on a desk
because there’s no space anywhere else & what’s your deepest
darkest secret? love is how i don’t even think of not answering.
how we go grocery shopping with a wheeled suitcase so that
no one’s arms get too tired. on the way i pick so many wildflowers
i start making you hold them for me. there’s a picnic table outside
the store & there i weave daisies & maidenstears into long chains
before we head inside, crowned the royal court of the frozen-food aisle
in a city we only freshly named home. for now our faces are all
still kissed by firelight. i was a little bit scared of you at first but now
i don’t even remember why. love is holding hands on the subway
so we don’t get separated. sharing plates in chinatown. sharing
clothes that fit inexplicably. sharing clothes that don’t fit at all.
buying postcards for the people who couldn’t come along. buying
double, because what a small cost for a little more joy. we find a garden
where the asters are thick with bumblebees & in the half-light
everything looks as soft as they do. love is look at you, you’re
golden. a sunshine-smile, hands framing the world, the moment
cast rich as maple by summer-heavy air. losing track of money owed
by accident. losing track on purpose. there’s something ageless
about this gold-blushed way of living. how i know all this will dim
as it recedes into memory, but never quite fade completely.
the night before we left, the curfew lifted for the only time
all month, but we all stayed right here & called it home
until the last moment it was ours.
“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.”
cosmic expansionby@horationed
the pacific ocean is 165.2 square miles by @/horationed
midlife crisis at seventeen 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
the tree is dying, and all i can do is watchby@horationed
corpse caringby@horationed
whale skeletons by @/horationed
