May 2013
18 posts
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Unrequited Love Poem, by Sierra DeMulder
You will be out with friends when the news of her existence will be accidentally spilled all over your bar stool. Respond calmly as if it was only a change in weather, a punch line you saw coming. After your fourth shot of cheap liquor, leave the image of him kissing another woman in the toilet. In the morning, her name will be in every headline: car crash, robbery, flood. When he calls you,...
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“God I want you
in some primal, wild way
animals want each other.
Untamed and...”
– Clementine von Radics, “Want”
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Expanding on the John Green post: Despite what I said, I still really like his work, and I like him as a person. I think the problem is just that I idolized him for so long especially with his writing career and now see the cracks in his carefully cultivated image. I also think I am reaching the older side of the spectrum now when it comes to his fans and I think that although he caters to us...
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Is it a sign of aging when John Green stops seeming like an evangelical purveyor of Knowledge and Truth and just starts seeming like a 30-year-old guy who writes somewhat self-involved novels and has more people than he deserves laughing at his jokes?
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I don’t know why, but the fact that I’m going to college next year finally seems real tonight. It hasn’t inspired any sentimentality (yet—I know it will relatively soon); it’s mostly excitement. I wasn’t really sure about my school (I’m still not completely, to be honest) but for the first time I can actually see myself there. It feels good.
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do...”
– Aldous Huxley
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Fruits like beady bloody jewels
If I breathe deeply enough I can smell the boxcar dust within your skin Your evicted grandparents on the rails to some place where there were oranges
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My Reservoir
My mother says I need to stop smoking cigarettes “They yellow your teeth” and I want to respond “Hey Mom, I would break my teeth if I could only bite hard enough.” I don’t say it, because I already know she is not fond of this new “rebellious streak.” She thinks it is an affront to her and all her principles like we’re still attached by my umbilical cord, like I haven’t been separate and...
“That’s what dries a writer up (we all dry up. That’s no insult to you in person)...”
– Ernest Hemingway, from a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald dated 10 May 1934
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When my little sister got her first period I spent the morning crying in the bathroom The narrow, dark-wooded walls slanted onto me Like Alice’s fairy-tale house, or a dream And my mother came inside And sat on the edge of the bathtub while I sat on the toilet seat
And the room is so small that our legs had to touch They were sweaty and had been shaved that morning with the same shaving...
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Literature and High School
I meant to write a poem, but instead I started thinking about this after I read Maureen Johnson’s article about book covers over at Huffington Post (read here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-johnson/gender-coverup_b_3231484.html). She mentions that 90% of the novels she read in college were by male authors. I started thinking about my high school curriculum, immediately coming to the...
“We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t...”
– Jeremy Glass, “We Can’t Get Lost Anymore”
April 2013
27 posts
I can’t fall asleep but I’m also in that semi-vegetative state where I can’t do anything productive either.
Looking through old journals
You think you may change, and yeah, you mature a bit, but the tenor of your thoughts remains exactly the same.
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“In the end there doesn’t have to be anyone who understands you. There just has...”
– Robert Brault
I get so frustrated with everything I am sometimes. Especially when I smell like dried chlorine and am lying in bed listening to a song that is doomed to be Top 40 radio this summer and care about things more than I should.
It’s all happening
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“When our breasts arrived
as a kind of currency, we’d tug
our camisoles low,...”
– Megan Falley, “Beginning in an Ice Cream Truck and Ending in a Court Room (After Kim Addonizio)”
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I’m going to Paris, London, Munich, and Brussels in like a little over two months…wow I am so excited
We’re allowed to miss each other, you know, even if neither of us wants to be the first to admit it.
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“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I feel like a greasy Happy Meal bag left out in the sun
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A letter for your high school yearbook
Remember when we went skinny-dipping freshman year And I had a rash of self-consciousness on my back, down my legs Gripped with terror that you would somehow see The dark, coarse hairs that spread to the insides of my thighs And your love wrapped around my foot like an eel and made me scream
Before you knew it there were black-eyed Susans growing in your stomach Spread out in the shape of me...
Why is Dick van Dyke circa Mary Poppins so hot
Every time I cross the 2 am mark, I reach the pinnacle of my self-loathing. For the dumbest things. Like using the word pinnacle.
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“I can’t remember the last time I sat down to write a story without thinking, Oh...”
– Jenny Zhang, “The Quiet Importance of Angst-y Art”
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Stream of consciousness, 4/11
Sometimes I want to skip ahead. To when it’s easy and simple; to when I don’t have to think anymore. I guess I’m saying what I want is security, but not in my lifestyle or anything, like I want to spend as much of my life doing as many things as possible (basically trying to become the opposite of my parents)—traveling, doing insane creative projects, helping people,...
You don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone or almost gone, at least.
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“I’m thinking back now to my dad’s unwitting nickname for each of his daughters,...”
– Amy Rose Spiegel, “The Sibling Ring”
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High school is really cramping my creative energy
I’m not the type of person who should be keeping these hours
The only thing fulfilling in my life right now is my deep desire to watch as many episodes of Downton Abbey as humanly possible in the shortest time frame possible
March 2013
31 posts
1 tag
“The best advice I can come up with is this: Keep your living expenses LOW. The...”
– Elizabeth Gilbert’s advice for people who want to turn their passion into a career, a fine addition to our ongoing archive of sage advice.
I hope I’m like Ani DiFranco when I’m in my 30s/40s. She’s still passionate and engaged in the world around her only a bit mellower and calmer than she was in her 20s. Which is awesome because I think a lot of people creatively throw the towel in when they hit their late 30s (which kind of worries me a lot…? It’s 20ish years away for me, but still).
“There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself...”
– Franz Kafka
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I feel like I’ve lost something in me that I used to have. Maybe the last time I had it was a year ago or so. It wasn’t confidence exactly, but it was similar. It was some cross of purpose and deep down, strong and willful faith in myself and what I was doing at every moment. And it’s gone. It’s really far gone and I don’t know if it’s been taken away by people...
