CAN YOU MAKE IT RAIN HARDER?

for Bryn Kelly, a trans woman writer and artist who died in 2016.

Months follow her funeral and still not all her mourners blow away.
Not enough wind in the world. Cruelty lives on too, inheres in you,
travels through the back of love like a spine. Locks of red that are gone.
Locks of blonde. You will buy grown up clothes, you will fail more people.
The sky tricks you with warmth, then, like her, leaves you. No good
woman no more, and why. We lined up, we looked handsome, we did no good.
The Thane of Fife had a wife, where is she now? Outside the karaoke room
I heard her broad voice through the glass: Purple rain, pur—rple rain,
but stayed outside talking to Joss and pressing my stupid fat face
on the window. Oh honey, look where the wind never seems to blow you
no matter what game you talk.

Stephen Ira

White Silence

Scream as I claw your velvet skin

Endre Ady
The White Silence

Good read for a Sunday morning

She should have gone to Specsavers

She should have gone to Specsavers

the world goes asunder

On a sunny day. The reality of fine-grained buttocks. The father’s death, a precarious event. I run my hand over your sex. The scent of stripped hazel. Keening comes to an end. Light turns red and runs over our bodies. We’re covered in red silt. We swim like two tadpoles as we touch the unravelling walls. My dress on the floor, like a giant dead bird.

It’s winter. The evening reeks of damp feathers. Icicles drop with a crash, the odd passerby rolls on the asphalt. I tune in my idleness to that of the cat. I read a few lines and then watch as the light wanes on your face, as your eyes change their colour. Beauty belongs to those idling their time away. Our life among poplars and snowfalls, among the conflagrations and parades. As I run my hand over your thigh, the world goes asunder. Somewhere on the outskirts of town, where desire ascends along with the carbon black, where heat no longer reaches, we vegetate superposed in a bed: your nipples on top of my nipples. Your eyes sunken into the dark lighten my skin. The fine-crystal mesh melting away with each breath.

When the heart shrivels up, shrinks to a raisin like grapes left to dry in the attic, when flesh ebbs away, when the body refuses to allow the world in any more, what’s the use of still trying, what’s the use of still smiling?

Leaves afloat in a jug. No old man is waiting.

Doina Ioanid
Chants for Taming the Hedgehog Sow

mirrors

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You’d dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You’d see the face of a stranger. And you’d know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

Milan Kundera
Immortality

show you God

If you ask me to show you God, I will point to the sun, or a tree, or a worm. But if you say, ‘You mean, then, that God is the sun, the tree, the worm, and all other things?’ — I shall have to say that you have missed the point entirely.

Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity

Lot’s Wife

The righteous man followed God’s luminous angels
And hurried after them over the hill.
But his wife heard an anxious voice that whispered:
“It isn’t too late, not yet; you can still
Look back at the towers of the town you came from,
At the street where you sang and the room where you spun,
At the empty windows of the house you cared for
And the bed where all your children were born.”
And of course she looked back. She felt a quick pang
And then everything ended. Her eyes closed
And her body dissolved into bitter crystals.
Her small feet stopped and grew into the ground.

No one seems to have mourned this woman;
She was only a minor event in the book.
But my heart holds fast to her memory:
A woman who gave up her life for a look.

Anna Akhmatova