girl passing through

Unrequited Love Poem, by Sierra DeMulder

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:15:00 -0400

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, ignore the hundreds of ropes
untangling themselves in your stomach.
You are the best friend again. He invites
you over for dinner and you say yes
too easily. Remind yourself this isn’t special,
it’s only dinner, everyone has to eat.
When he greets you at the door, do not think
for one second you are the reason
he wore cologne tonight.

In his kitchen, he will hand-feed you
a piece of red pepper. His laugh
will be low and warm and it will make you
feel like candlelight. Do not think this is special.
Do not count on your fingers the number
of freckles you could kiss too easily.
Try to think of pilot lights and olive oil,
not everything you have ever loved about him,
or it will suddenly feel boiling and possible
and so close. You will find her bobby pins
laying innocently on his bathroom sink.
Her bobby pins. They look like the wiry legs
of spiders, splinters of her undressing
in his bed. Do not say anything.
Think of stealing them, wearing them
home in your hair. When he hugs you goodbye,
let him kiss you on the forehead.
Settle for target practice.

At home, you will picture her across town
pressing her fingers into his back
like wet cement. You will wonder
if she looks like you, if you are two bedrooms
in the same house. Did he fall for her features
like rearranged furniture? When he kisses her,
does she taste like wet paint?

You will want to call him.
You will go as far as holding the phone
in your hand, imagine telling him
unimaginable things like you are always
ticking inside of me and I dream of you
more often than I don’t.
My body is a dead language
and you pronounce
each word perfectly.

Do not call him.
Fall asleep to the hum of the VCR.
She must make him happy.
She must be—
She must be his favorite place in Minneapolis.
You are a souvenir shop, where he goes
to remember how much people miss him
when he is gone.

ohmeganisaraw: Joseph Lorusso, Soft Eyes

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:09:28 -0400

ohmeganisaraw:

Joseph Lorusso, Soft Eyes

"God I want you in some primal, wild way animals want each other. Untamed and full of teeth. God I..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:55:00 -0400

“God I want you
in some primal, wild way
animals want each other.
Untamed and full of teeth.

God I want you,
In some chaste, Victorian way.
A glimpse of your ankle
just kills me.

”

- Clementine von Radics, “Want”

Expanding on the John Green post: Despite what I said, I still really like his work, and I like him...

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:21:00 -0400

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 older ones with his novels and such, his everyday sort of work is definitely directed at younger teenagers. I don’t think it’s his fault or mine, really. It’s just that a lot of the things that a 13-year-old might find profound or funny aren’t the same for an 18-year-old.

Photo

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:01:41 -0400

Is it a sign of aging when John Green stops seeming like an evangelical purveyor of Knowledge and...

Wed, 15 May 2013 23:56:53 -0400

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?

I don’t know why, but the fact that I’m going to college next year finally seems real...

Wed, 15 May 2013 23:51:46 -0400

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.

Jerome David Salinger, 1919 - 2010

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:53:04 -0400

Jerome David Salinger, 1919 - 2010

"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly...."

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:52:19 -0400

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”

- Aldous Huxley

Fruits like beady bloody jewels

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:46:00 -0400

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

My Reservoir

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:31:00 -0400

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 separating like
some rogue tectonic plate
for eighteen years.

But listen, Mom, I am not trying to hurt you.
It’s just that sometime after I entered high school
I realized an ingrown life is not unlike a toenail
and in my case it required radical surgery
and I completed my recovery
before you even realized I’d gone under the knife.

I’m free now, I can breathe easy
but I no longer want to swim in your overly-chlorinated pool
I’m sorry but I hate its filter
all I want is to lie in a reservoir of my own anger
and overflow with the boys I love;
they nick my knees with their fishing hooks and
tangle me in their lines
fuck, I wish they could write poetry—
but mostly I wish they were not fishermen
so they would not gut me as cleanly and as thoroughly.

(Oh, Mom, I miss when you were enough love for me
enough love for the whole world.)

mythologyofblue: On February 7th of 1909, a 30-year-old mother...

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:06:00 -0400

mythologyofblue:

On February 7th of 1909, a 30-year-old mother of two by the name of Emma Hauck was admitted to the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, having recently been diagnosed with dementia praecox. The outlook improved briefly and a month later she was discharged, only to be readmitted within weeks as her condition deteriorated further. Sadly, the downturn continued and in August of that year, with her illness deemed “terminal” and rehabilitation no longer an option, Emma was transferred to Wiesloch asylum, the facility in which she would pass away eleven years later. It was around this time that a heartbreaking collection of letters, one of which is above, were discovered in the archives of the Heidelberg hospital; all written obsessively in Emma’s hand during her second stay at the clinic in 1909, at a time when reports indicate she was relentlessly speaking of her family. Each desperate letter is directed at her absent husband, Mark, and every page is thick with overlapping text. Some are so condensed as to be illegible; some read “Herzensschatzi komm” (“Sweetheart come”) over and over; others simply repeat the plea, “komm komm komm,” (“come come come”) thousands of times. None were sent.

"That’s what dries a writer up (we all dry up. That’s no insult to you in person) not listening. That..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:04:40 -0400

“That’s what dries a writer up (we all dry up. That’s no insult to you in person) not listening. That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening. Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it.”

- Ernest Hemingway, from a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald dated 10 May 1934

When my little sister got her first period I spent the morning crying in the bathroom The narrow,...

Thu, 09 May 2013 20:55:00 -0400

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 cream
Which is an important smell

And she asked me why I was crying

And I said that I was losing momentum in some God-damned race
Because the only thing I’d ever been better at was being older

My crocodile tears thick on my cheeks—
She comforted me and I didn’t deserve it

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:36:37 -0400

Literature and High School

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:30:00 -0400

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 conclusion that it was far superior in equal gender representation of the authors—I knew my curriculum dealt badly with race, for sure, but I thought maybe women were more integrated in my learning experiences the last four years. Then I made a list of the literature I’d read for school (and done some sort of project on, because I figured that meant we focused on it and didn’t just read it one day quickly). Bold is for female authors, astericks are for gay authors, and italics are for authors of color.

To Kill a Mockingbird
Romeo and Juliet
Lord of the Flies
The Book Thief
Night
Into the Wild
The Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Glass Menagerie*
Macbeth
“Girl”
The Scarlet Letter
Brave New World
The Shallows
Stiff
Alias Grace
Germinal
“Leda and the Swan”
“It sifts through leaden sieves”
“Aubade”
Oedipus Rex
“Jocasta”
Hamlet
Death of a Salesman
Invisible Man
The Importance of Being Earnest*

The authors of these pieces are 75% male, 93% straight, and 93% white.

There’s something wrong here. (That’s 100% Western novels too, by the way.) I’ve had great English teachers the past few years, and i feel kind of guilty because I know a lot of them did try to diversify the curriculum (most of those efforts did not result in major concentrations on those pieces, however). But there is something severely wrong with enabling the majority of teenagers (who don’t read on their own, really) to develop such a limited worldview. I don’t know. I’m getting kind of melodramatic, but literature humanizes. It would be nice to view some other people as human, or some people more often for a change.

"We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:44:23 -0400

“We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean, because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.”

- Jeremy Glass, “We Can’t Get Lost Anymore”

David Foster Wallace on Ambition “If your fidelity to...

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:00:05 -0400

David Foster Wallace on Ambition

“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.” - David Foster Wallace.

It’s Episode #3 from our new series with PBS Digital Studios

Interview originally aired on the Leonard Lopate Show WNYC | 1996

Subscribe for more animated interviews: www.youtube.com/blankonblank

I can’t fall asleep but I’m also in that semi-vegetative state where I can’t do...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:22:01 -0400

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

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:55:06 -0400

You think you may change, and yeah, you mature a bit, but the tenor of your thoughts remains exactly the same.