# data[].attributes.body
"It could only be a waking dream, he thought, in which everything is doomed to recur, or else a symptom of derangement."

# data[].attributes.body
"he who had shipwrecked himself in an alley,
who had pushed himself up on cold-numbed hands,
thinking of what his life has been,
of the loneliness that waits for him at home,
thinking what is this, what the hell is this
damned dirty white

falling snow."

# data[].attributes.body
"Standing at this border where land and water meet, watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves (though this eternity is in fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish, everything will one day vanish), the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity.
Each wave becomes dazzingly white at the moment of its shattering. Farther out, the tranquil body of water flashes like the scales of innumerable fish. The glittering of multitudes is there. The shifting, stirring, tossing of multitudes. Nothing is eternal."

# data[].attributes.body
"And she frequently forgot,
That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand
That it had shattered and is shattering still.
Slipping stubbornly through fingers."

# data[].attributes.body
"Learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.

Because at some point you will inevitably cast me aside."

# data[].attributes.body
"I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best."

# data[].attributes.body
"I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling."

# data[].attributes.body
"A person who had met the same fate as that city. Who had at one time died or been destroyed. Who had painstakingly rebuilt themselves on a foundation of fire-scoured ruins. Who was therefore something new. Who, some broken pediment having survived, has ended up bearing a strange pattern, the new distinct from the old.

# data[].attributes.headline
the thirteen letters, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.subject
the thirteen letters, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.body
"There’s this feeling I get after a firefight, when the shells are still bouncing across the ground, and I’m still a little blind and deaf, but the whole world is crystal clear, and I could just fall to the ground and cry like a baby because I’m still alive. The first time I felt it I thought I was going to burst out of my skin. And then everything rushed back so quick I felt like a newborn. The whole world was brand-new and I was on top of it. I could swallow it whole.

You think I haven’t seen the same look on your face?

The closest I’ve ever been to the Garden of Eden is the genesis on the battlefield when the shrapnel’s still falling like hail on a tin roof. You look at me with those blue eyes all hot and electric in your face, blood on your cheek, soot smudged over your nose. Bone of my bones. Were you taken from my rib? You must have been, or maybe I was made from yours. And God damn, I want it. I want back inside you. I want you now, same as I wanted you before, prettier than hell even with a bloodied nose and split knuckles. Don’t care you were smaller. Liked it, even — same as I like you this way too. You make me hungry. You understand? You make me hungry. That mouth pink like spun sugar, though it doesn’t stop you from talking fit to cut anyone down to bits with your angry words. A spitfire since you learned how to speak, and I’ll tell you something, it’s hell to love a fighter.

Anyway, Jesus — I shouldn’t even be thinking it, much less writing it down. I used to love you so sweet, the way kids love, the way I was supposed to. Then it turned greedy and true. If there’s any Heaven that’s fit for me it’d be all your pale skin under my hands for the rest of eternity. I wouldn’t need anything else. Not food or drink or sleep. Just my hands on you and your sweet love-sounds.

I think it’s fit I take it to the grave. Wouldn’t make you any happier. In fact it’d do nothing but put you in danger — that ain’t something I want. It’s another story I tell myself, I guess. That I’m being noble and doing it for you, when really I’m just being scared, and can’t do it to myself.

# data[].attributes.headline
the thirteen letters, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.subject
the thirteen letters, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.body
"The God’s honest truth is that I ain’t ever gonna love again. She’s your true north. I know what that means, because you’re mine."

# data[].attributes.headline
the thirteen letters, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.subject
the thirteen letters, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.body
"So how long have I loved you for? Womb to tomb, sweetheart. Since before I was even here at all. I get it now, you understand. Your ma was right. It really is a stupid question."

# data[].attributes.body
"Ideals are peaceful. History is violent."

# data[].attributes.headline
a long winter, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.subject
a long winter, dropdeaddream + WhatAreFears

# data[].attributes.body
"I won’t be in the history books; that’s for you. But I loved you first. As long as they get that right, I don’t care what they say."

# data[].attributes.body
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

# data[].attributes.body
“I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colors.”

# data[].attributes.headline
1) you, 2) and me, 3) and you, helicases

# data[].attributes.subject
1) you, 2) and me, 3) and you, helicases

# data[].attributes.body
“Work slowly pushes him underwater, and he tries to tread and stay above the surface.”

# data[].attributes.body
"To live is to be somebody else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: To feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is to not feel at all. . . today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life."

# data[].attributes.body
“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.”

# data[].attributes.body
"Something else is yet to happen, only where and what?
Someone will head toward them, only when and who,
in how many shapes and with what intentions?
Given a choice,
maybe he will choose not

# data[].attributes.body
"And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good."

# data[].attributes.body
"And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can."

# data[].attributes.body
“A final thought: sometimes joy multiples itself dangerously.”

# data[].attributes.body
"Even if my Manhattan productivity is powered by a sociopathic illusion of my own limitlessness, I’m thankful for it, at least when I’m writing.”

# data[].attributes.body
“You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. ‘A reality shaped around your own desires’ — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

# data[].attributes.body
“there is a kind of individualism so stark that it seems to dovetail with an existentialist creed: Manhattan is right at that crossroads.”

# data[].attributes.body
"The fashion is for indirection.”

# data[].attributes.body
“Our plan is to pass on the art of the shadow of ideas, to lead you out from your sleeping nature; from error, misdirection and being led astray; from deficiencies of energy; to support and strengthen you, correct errors, achieve perfect results, and make you the emulation of industriousness.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The Shadow of Ideas

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The Shadow of Ideas

# data[].attributes.body
“It was the suicide of a whole culture.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Love in the Garden

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Love in the Garden

# data[].attributes.body
“In the first season of mourning there is a tendency to overstate.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Meet Justin Bieber!

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Meet Justin Bieber!

# data[].attributes.body
“[…] most people rarely—if ever—meet their closest friends, mothers don’t always meet their children, and many a husband has never met his wife, though he may sleep next to her every night.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Man Versus Corpse

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Man Versus Corpse

# data[].attributes.body
“A persistent problem for artists: How can I insist upon the reality of death, for others, and for myself?”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The I Who Is Not Me

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The I Who Is Not Me

# data[].attributes.body
“Writers, like everybody else, are stumbling through this world, constantly re-examining the checks and balances of their choices, knowing they are helping here but hurting there. In my life, at least, the flesh-and-blood ‘I’ and the I-who-is-not-me stumble equally, neither ever coming close to perfection.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The I Who Is Not Me

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The I Who Is Not Me

# data[].attributes.body
“Now, who exactly does this girl think she is? My answer to that was: ‘no one.’”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Dance Lessons for Writers

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Dance Lessons for Writers

# data[].attributes.body
“Genius contained, genius ring-fenced. But also, genius undeniable.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Dance Lessons for Writers

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Dance Lessons for Writers

# data[].attributes.body
"The art of not dancing — a vital lesson."

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Windows on the Will: Anomalisa

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, Windows on the Will: Anomalisa

# data[].attributes.body
"One way of dealing with the boredom of our own needs might be to complicate them unnecessarily, so as always to have something new to desire.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The House That Hova Built

# data[].attributes.subject
Zadie Smith, Feel Free, The House That Hova Built

# data[].attributes.body
“She doesn’t have to be tough. She has to love herself, she has to know who she is, she has to be respectful, and be a moral person.”

# data[].attributes.body
“Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”

# data[].attributes.body
“There’s a romantic story that says people are just creative because that’s what they like to do and they just go around all the time creating. Which is just kind of ridiculous in a way. Sometimes people have to create out of pure necessity.”

# data[].attributes.body
"Your talent belongs to you, but your reputation always belongs to other people. you can’t control it. Focus on the talent in front of you and everything will be okay.”

# data[].attributes.body
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."

# data[].attributes.body
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

# data[].attributes.body
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

# data[].attributes.body
"'Love is inexact,' Henry said. 'It is not a science. It is barely a noun. It means one thing to one person, and one thing to another. It means one thing to one person at one point and then something else at another point. It doesn't make sense.'"

# data[].attributes.body
"It's sort of terrible, though, isn't it?"
"What?"
"When you get everything you wanted."

# data[].attributes.body
"There were, as Henry saw it, two kinds of pain. Short pain and long pain. [...] Short pain was part of your body. Long pain was part of your life."

# data[].attributes.body
"Her aloneness felt like both a result of her stubborn persistence (something she was doing to herself) and a burden to bear (something everyone else was doing to her).

# data[].attributes.body
"And what did they find in her? What was she to them? In the ensemble: proficient, subordinate, pianississimo, the smallest sound you could make, the only kind of sound that recalls its very absence."

# data[].attributes.body
"And when her mother died, she resigned herself to occupying the two ends of a wild oscillation she'd inherited from her parents' lives and then their deaths: the raw, hungry desire to experience an inexplicable love, and the melancholic knowledge that she might never get to."

# data[].attributes.body
"Grief is evolutionarily determined, he would say. Falling in love is chemical, he would say. Staying in love is a choice, he would say. Love is expensive, he would say.

# data[].attributes.body
"Who said it—Mozart or someone? 'With ease, or not at all.' What if nothing's easy?"

# data[].attributes.body
"He hugged with his whole body, as though he wasn't afraid she wouldn't hug back. He hugged without needing someone to hug him back. She did hug him back, eventually."

# data[].attributes.body
"Well, I don't know about you, but I contain many pitches. It's about moving from polyphony to harmony. People are so much music. People don't recognize that enough."

# data[].attributes.body
"'Yes,' Daniel said. 'I was watching you all the time then. I always thought you were pretty. You must know that you're pretty."
"'I don't know that,' she said. What she meant was, Tell me more about how I'm pretty.

# data[].attributes.body
"And in a way, this new grief balanced out the other grief that had already broken off a part of her, and she became resigned to their muting implications. She was lesser."

# data[].attributes.body
"To love, he said, is but to imagine well."

# data[].attributes.body
"Until then, nothing I played had evoked the orphic singing I knew to be possible. It was an ideal I lacked the skill to bring to life. Each first-place prize marked a point when I'd let the music down. With Libich, I failed less. His étude asked so much of me that, at times, I'd forget I had an I. I should have learned, from this, that playing had to be birthed in a place without ego, in which I didn't exist except as the living conduit, Libich's medium."

# data[].attributes.body
"This is my body, which is broken for you."

# data[].attributes.body
"It's possible these are just details I've saved. It could be grief's narrow vision: I've noticed what I've lacked."

# data[].attributes.body
"I felt free, blameless: I'd have liked to be lost all night."

# data[].attributes.body
"I tried to help, but if discipline is a muscle, hers had atrophied."

# data[].attributes.headline
(don't you want to be) ordinary with me, mahistrado

# data[].attributes.subject
(don't you want to be) ordinary with me, mahistrado

# data[].attributes.body
"we can break patterns of abuse without disrespecting sacrifice"

# data[].attributes.body
"But look at you. You took your pain and turned it into gold.”

# data[].attributes.body
“Our bodies: inscrutable because unmeaning. They remain the essential mystery we keep trying to solve. although sanity tells us the attempt can only end in dissolution, mind and body both."

# data[].attributes.body
“It is the body that makes us crux: our inability to interpret our corporeality, the inscrutable messages it bathes us in with every passing moment. For the patients, it wasn’t their insistence on interpreting, on trying to decode those messages, that made them mad. We are no different in this. The only thing that separates them from us, I realized, is the solutions we arrive at.”

# data[].attributes.body
“As medicine, it’s relatively simple. And there is a pure and uncomplicated pleasure in taking a patient who is minutes away from death and dragging him out of darkness into light. The problem, or course, is that sometimes you fall short of that goal. Too often, we’re able to rescue somebody from death, but can’t quite bring him back to life. People get stuck in that horrible twilight in between.”

# data[].attributes.body
"If I could hide in dreams.
Or perhaps in memories."

# data[].attributes.body
Sitting alone in his living room—their living room—he now said to himself, “I’m afraid of losing verbs.”

Because losing nouns, that was something that happened all the time. Losing people and places and things—life was about learning how to lose nouns. Change friends, lose mentors; move towns, lose homes. Give up the things you own—all a part of rolling with the waves of being alive.

But losing verbs, that was a part of dying.

Everyone is terrified of some aspect of dying, he told himself. And it wasn’t the ceasing to exist that made Jeongguk shiver the most; it was the lead up, the part of dying you could do without ever closing your eyes. Losing the ability to– yes. Losing the strength to– yes. Losing the way verbs feel in your chest when you know they’re beating there, strong. Yes.

Losing nouns was a study in don’t. Don’t have, don’t hold, don’t go.

Losing verbs, in contrast, was a study in can’t.

And that was worse.

# data[].attributes.body
"Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either."

# data[].attributes.body
"'When I listen to this music I feel like I'm in a wide-open, empty place. It's a vast space, with nothing to close it off. No walls, no ceiling. I don't need to think, don't need to say anything, or do anything. Just being there is enough. I close my eyes and give myself up to the beautiful strings. There're no headaches, no sensitivity to cold, no periods, or ovulation. Everything is simply beautiful, peaceful, flowing. I can just be.'"

# data[].attributes.headline
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.subject
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.body
"What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?
What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?"

# data[].attributes.headline
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.subject
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.body
"Lydia spat. 'Oh god. I'm so done. You're crazy. You're crazy. You just walk around mumbling and staring all of the time. What is wrong with you? You should be ashamed of yourself.'
'It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,' I said. 'It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.' The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. 'You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.'"

# data[].attributes.headline
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.subject
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.body
"I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, of Viktor Shklovsky's idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning."

# data[].attributes.headline
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.subject
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.body
"Was this friendship? Was this how things were supposed to be? It felt that way, that I had ecstatically stumbled into happiness, and everything seemed right and correct."

# data[].attributes.headline
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

# data[].attributes.subject
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

# data[].attributes.body
“Visitación did not recognize him when she opened the door and she thought he had come with the idea of selling something, unaware that nothing could be sold in a town that was sinking irrevocably into the quicksand of forgetfulness.”

# data[].attributes.body
“I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me—just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better off.”

# data[].attributes.body
“‘I’m from Grimsby and I certainly don’t want to work in a district hospital there.’

‘But it isn’t quite the same thing, is it? We’re speaking of some of the world’s poorest people. The doctors have a responsibility as Africans,’ Alexa said. ‘Life isn’t fair, really. If they have the privilege of that medical degree then it comes with a responsibility to help their people.’

‘I see. I don’t suppose any of us should have that responsibility for the blighted towns in the north of England?’ Mark said.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.subject
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.body
"I held her, and in the levity of the water, she held me.
'The ocean,' she said, 'is a big lez. I can tell.'
'But not one of history,' I said.
'No,' she agreed. 'Of space and time.'
I considered this. My legs gently scissored through the water. My lips tasted like salt."

# data[].attributes.headline
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.subject
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

# data[].attributes.body
"'Let's try this,' she said. She took a hit and put her mouth on mine, filling my lungs with heady smoke. I took it in, all of it, desire shooting straight through me. As we languished there, I felt my whole self loosening, my mind retreating to a place somewhere around my left ear."

# data[].attributes.body
"god should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men."

# data[].attributes.body
“Those are exactly the kind of people who murdered Miss Saeki’s childhood sweetheart. Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here.”

# data[].attributes.body
“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”

# data[].attributes.body
"If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets."

# data[].attributes.body
“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”

# data[].attributes.body
“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

# data[].attributes.body
"Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind; by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world."

# data[].attributes.body
“When Ifemelu Met Obinze, she told Aunty Uju that she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside.”

# data[].attributes.body
“When I was in the states, I sent him a picture I’d taken of the ocean. The sky just went, you know, it just went. It had like every single color of blue there is, melding right into the sea, and this flock of gulls took off right as I took it, so there’s all these birds just going up into this endless blue. My classmates looked at it and said they saw chaos, desperation, anger—all these heavy, ugly words, and I guess I could see how they could see that, but it wasn’t what I saw at all. He always responds when I send him pictures and usually he says, like, “I don’t know about art but—” or “I’m not sure about photography but—”, only that time he didn’t. He looked at my picture and said ‘this makes me think of your voice, tae. it’s beautiful, i want to live in it’ and—” He exhales in a rush, curls over like he’s been punched in the gut.  “Oh,” He breathes, “oh oh oh. I don't know what to do. I've never felt like this. I don’t know how to feel like this. It’s too big, it’s so scary."

# data[].attributes.body
because you

were never holy

only beautiful

enough

to be found

with a hook

in your mouth
water shook
like sparks
as they pulled
you up
& sometimes

your hand
is all you have
to hold
yourself
to this world
because it’s

the sound
not the prayer
that enters
the thunder not
the lightning
that wakes you

in lonely midnight
sheets holy
water smeared
between your thighs
where no man
ever drowned

from too much
thirst & when
is the cumshot not
an articulation
of chewed stars
go ahead—lift

the sugar-
crusted thumb
& teach
the tongue
of unbridled
nourishment

to be lost in
an image
is to find within it
a door so close
your eyes

& open reach

down with every rib
humming
the desperation
of unstruck
piano keys

some call this being

human some call this
walking but
you already know
it’s the briefest form
of flight yes even
the saints

remember this
the if under every
utterance
beneath
the breath brimmed
like cherry blossoms

foaming into no one’s
springtime
how often these lines
resemble claw marks
of your brothers
being dragged

away from you
you whose name
not heard
by the ear
but the smallest bones
in the graves you

who ignite the april air
with all your petals’
here here here who
twist through

barbedwired light
despite knowing

how color beckons
decapitation
i reach down
looking for you
in american dirt
in towns with names

like hope
celebration
success & sweet
lips like money
laramie jasper
& sanford towns

whose trees know
the weight of history
can bend their branches
to breaking
lines whose roots burrow
through stones

& hard facts
gathering
the memory of rust
& iron
mandibles
& amethyst yes

touch yourself
like this part
the softest wound’s
unhealable
hunger
after all

the lord cut you
here
to remind us

where he came from
pin this antlered
body back

to earth
cry out

until the dark fluents
each faceless
beast banished
from the ark

as you scrape the salt
off the cunt-cock
& call it

daylight
don’t

be afraid

to be this
illuminated
to be so bright
& empty
the bullets pass
right through

you
thinking
they have reached
the sky
as you press
your hand

to a blood-warm
body
like a word

being nailed
to its meaning
& lives

# data[].attributes.body
"Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow."

# data[].attributes.body
"The stars are not hereditary"

# data[].attributes.headline
Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds [To My Father / To My Unborn Son]

# data[].attributes.subject
Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds [To My Father / To My Unborn Son]

# data[].attributes.body
There was a door & then a door

surrounded by a forest.

Look, my eyes are not

your eyes.

You move through me like rain heard

from another country.

Yes, you have a country.

Someday, they will find it

while searching for lost ships . . .

Once, I fell in love

during a slow-motion car crash.

We looked so peaceful, the cigarette floating from his lips

as our heads whip-lashed back

into the dream & all

was forgiven.

Because what you heard, or will hear, is true: I wrote

a better world onto the page

& watched the fire take it back.

Something was always burning.

Do you understand? I closed my mouth

but could still taste the ash

because my eyes were open.

From men, I learned to praise the thickness of walls.

From women,

I learned to praise.

If you are given my body, put it down.

If you are given anything

be sure to leave no tracks in the snow.

Know that I never chose

which way the seasons turned. That it was always October

in my throat.

& you: every leaf

refusing to rust.

Quick. Can you see the red dark shifting?

This means I am touching you. This means

you are not alone—even

as you are not.

If you get there before me, if you think

of nothing

& my face appears rippling

like a torn flag—turn back.

Turn back & find the book

I left us, filled

with all the colors of the sky

forgotten by gravediggers.

Use it. Use it to prove how the stars

were always what we believed

they were: the exit-wounds

of every

misfired word.

# data[].attributes.body
“Red is only black remembering.”

# data[].attributes.body
“Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven—waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through.”

# data[].attributes.body
“then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us.”

# data[].attributes.body
“If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.”

# data[].attributes.body
“Without the threat of suffering, we can’t experience true joy. The best we get is pleasantness.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

# data[].attributes.subject
Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

# data[].attributes.body
"Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you're going to start crying at inappropriate times."

# data[].attributes.body
"he doesn’t have a name, specifically, but he can call it: he’ll take anything, right now, to distract himself.

call it: he understands how bad habits begin.

call it: he feels like he’s going to choke on yellow-stained teeth.

call it: he feels like jetsam.

call it: his brain and body feel like they’re bound by threads as thin as strands of hair, and only by threads as thin as strands of hair.

call it: it feels as if, as cliché as it is, that he’s so exhausted that he’s a step from shutting down.

call it: he hopes, if that happens, that his heart goes first."

# data[].attributes.headline
Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

# data[].attributes.subject
Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

# data[].attributes.body
"But of course, the secret to Indian hair is merely to be Indian, to have decades of systemic racism, and fear of the other, and beauty anxiety, and fetishization, and repulsion woven into your roots. I mean, I use Amla oil too, but even that is a ploy from Indian cosmetic companies creating products that suggest you, too, could possess the sheen and strength and length that we got from our mothers, who got it from their mothers, and so on and so on. Mostly, it helps to be brown.

Nevertheless, my hair is perfect by a rigid and admittedly colonial standard only. The status quo leads us to believe thick hair is good, but only on your head, and if it's light in colour, all the better. We like straight hair - frizzy or naturally curly hair scares us, namely on a non-white female body. Scariest of all, maybe is the hair of black people, hair so unspeakably different that we think we are entitled to touch it in public. We scold black women for letting their natural hair grow out, or tell them their braids or twists are 'unprofessional' at work. Then we scold them for relaxing their locks or getting weaves, because you can't win unless you were born with the 'right' kind of hair. I believe my hair is perfect only because white girls and stupid boys have told me it is perfect. This is my physical worth. I am judged attractive only by what grows out of my head, and only when that is compared to hair we've decided is bad. The price, then, is 'unwanted' hair everywhere else on my person."