AUGUST 2021
fernanda melchor’s incredibly beautiful reckoning with what it means to be taken as a woman when you are not yet one
metamorphoses and the certainty of change—that there is no disappearance, only the changing of forms and spaces.
world was in the face of the beloved
Braid your hair, my boys, with greener leaves.
We still have verse among us.
coming home drunk and reading the duino elegies aloud to the thinking dark
static pink-purple of calla lilies consonant with morning light
etel adnan: when in love, one becomes a bird.
not knowing where we were, but knowing that I was with you
yoko ono’s grapefruit as a hangover cure
james joyce taking down nora barnacle’s dreams
callous blue cold of the pacific ringing deep into the very center of the body, riveting it alive
yellow perfect crescent of moon shredding the white perfect silk of sky
a spread of citrus in water
mattress in the living room
paul celan reading deathfugue in the heaviest, simplest, hardest voice
irrational nights that plays themselves like songs
what paolo sorrentino did with youth was how life becomes a life at all, or a compendium of pages, or a list of items, or a mind that hides from itself as well as it reveals
even in the burned forest the bird
has come back to sing
the desire to mold myself
into a verse
a cry
a fleck of foam.
to live in a negotiation of placeness, borders as an explanation of identity.
the full moon golden as if whispering to the sun
writing “always the clock, always the corridor, always the staircase”, dreaming of what wong kar-wai has made possible by his conjugations of impossibility
spending a spare minute in the desert hues of ed ruscha
watching maangamizi in theatres, how feeling and affinity come to be the judgment of everything
the lemony sky slowly curing dark in oil-paint washes, being watched on the pacific’s cascade
lights on the dock creating their own, sheer, vertical landscape
the inherent radicalism of women’s friendship
“nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power.”
