English added by me :)

ur so right though

This is the real gaslight gatekeep girl boss

a little reminder! by annalaura_art

periodically I get the urge to write poetry again but now that I've taken multiple poetry classes where I read hundreds of contemporary poems, and then read 2x the amount of contemporary poems from going through all the recent issues of poetry magazines in my school library (because i spent hours in the magazine archive section of the library every evening because I went there for alone time), I have a deep hate and loathing of "literary" poetry and the magazines that publish it

The more I have read poetry journals, the more I have despised contemporary "literary" poetry. I think it is because of the following things:

That last point is the biggest reason I lost my taste for poetry. Partly, it was just the overwhelming focus on human misery in general, but it felt like poems by "minority" writers were especially afflicted.

I don't have numbers gathered together to support this, but it was very noticeable, both in my classes and in my independent reading, that poems about spring, birds, flowers, appreciating beauty, and literally anything innocuous generally were written by white men. Poems by writers of color, as well as poets described as LGBTQ+ in any way, were so frequently focused on abuse, oppression, sexual violence, being called slurs, and trauma that you would easily think only cishet white guys wrote about anything else.

It's not at all that I think marginalized writers should only write about happy things—i'm not criticizing the writers at all, but rather the publishers.

After you've read about a thousand poems from literary magazines, the traumatic poems stop looking like individual writers asking you to look at a challenging and painful reality, and start looking like choices made by editors and publishers, and you start to see them all arrayed in a pattern, a pattern that repeats until the individual poems blur together and it stops appearing uplifting or socially aware and starts to take this sick, almost fetishistic feeling, because there is so little joy, so little celebration, almost no redemption or healing or just normal life shown in the poems by "marginalized" poets, only this flat one-dimensional gallery of poems competing to be the most blatant public confessional of the worst trauma.

Here's a recent poem from Poetry Daily that showcases a lot of what I can't stand about contemporary poetry

It's literally a bunch of sentences separated into stanzas. The structure alone is so flat and despairing. There's no immediately comprehensible topic or direction anywhere. It's basically a rhythmless, plodding list of images that mostly seem barely related to one another, some appearing to be no-context traumatic memories, each stated as a sentence.

This does NOT save my life a little bit.

one of the poets i had to read for one of my classes was David Kirby, whose writing is best described as "POV: incredibly pretentious man talks at you in a way he thinks is 'cool' and 'casual' because he's wine-drunk and thinks he's the most charming, charismatic person alive."

Most of his poems are like, 4 pages long.

Some of my gripes sound incredibly overly specific but they describe a whole entire category of bad literary poem

A lot going on here. There's rhythm but it's like "THUNK....THUNK.....THUNK...THUNK.....THUNK..."

Anyway, this one is an iteration of "visceral detail of someone using their hands for preparing/handling/"separating"/ "parting"/"cleaving" etc, meat or something with "flesh" or flesh-like qualities, but it feels like a very subtle, sublimated gesture at a metaphor for sexual violation." There are...a weird amount of poems like this.

But it's fashionable right now for "literary" poets to be so extremely viscerally tactile in their poetry that they can't describe anything without making it sound like human genitals. So who knows.

Honestly, what's wrong with so many writers that they make everything except sex sound so sexual???They'll write about their mom's smoking problem like "The silky cleave of cigarette smoke slipped its fingers into the bathroom door, spread its sticky folds in the pink lungs within me" And then write about actual sexual intercourse like "My sex, its slug-like mass, convulsed like a vacuum cleaner gargling spilled dog kibble..."

cards 0-5 in my muppets major arcana

Muse

It was half past six on a Thursday morning, and Edward Townsend was about to die.

He’d known for days now – a whole wall of his cramped and filthy apartment was filled with nothing but death scenes, painted increasingly frantically on canvas, and notebook pages, and paper towel, and eventually right onto the wall. At first he’d thought he could avoid it, had tried to paint different scenarios instead, but it had been useless – a whole sequence of him being run down in the street or stabbed in a back alley his only reward for the efforts – he’d never been good at being clever about these things. It’s not what his gift was for.

In the end he dealt with it like he dealt with all the other looming deadlines and oncoming catastrophes in his life – ignored them, and tried to loose himself in making something beautiful, instead.

It hadn’t worked out in college, either.

And now there were men with guns hammering on his door, the flimsy wood rattling despite the lock, and deadbolt, and chair propped up under the knob. Behind behind him was his latest half-finished masterpiece, the canvas large enough to completely block out the window in what had at one point been a living room.

Edward was shaking as much as the door was. He had a whole selection of knives within arms reach, a gun he’d bought months ago for a day just like this (and never so much as touched, since), he even had the painting behind him, close enough to finished he might be able to find somewhere he could escape  into before they got to him.

Instead he just sat on a repurposed kitchen stool, listening to the group outside half-whisper to each other after getting tired of knocking. One sounded like he was trying not to gag from the smell, asking in his hoarse voice ‘how the hell was this guy so hard to find? The super should have been calling in for a wellness check weeks ago. Something’s definitely dead in there!”

Edward wanted to be offended at that, but it was a fair question, really. He’d long since gotten used to the noxious mix of bleach and oil, blood and urine, paint and ink, and the dozen other heady scents that suffused the apartment and had surely started seeping out. But then, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d paid rent, either. Any more than he paid for the groceries that were delivered every week. It was all just…taken care of, just like he’d been told it would be. To let him focus on his work.

Someone else told the first man to be quiet, and their voices grew too quiet to understand, no matter how much he focused on that low, threatening murmur. He leaned forward as he listened, as if that would help. Part of him wanted to get up, put his ear against the door and try to hear the thugs deciding his fate. But he didn’t, any more than he moved his canvas out of the way and tried to clamber down the fire escape before the door came down, or got up and got the gun to try and fight for his life.

He was tired. Had been for weeks. He couldn’t remember his dreams anymore, except how much they hurt, how he woke scratching himself bloody or sobbing into his pillow or both. He’d been loosing weight even before he stopped caring enough to eat half the time. And worst of all, he’d lost his spark. The apartment was full to bursting with abandoned works and failures, imitations of everyone he’d ever admired, retreadings of every style and subject he’d ever loved. Some were comedic, most were merely competent, but none were transcendent. He’d communed with the divine, channeled something beyond him, and now it was gone, the only parting gift a taunting advertisement for his own murder. His muse had abandoned him, figuratively as well as literally.

So when the door started rattling again – they weren’t knocking any more, closer to ramming. The hinges were already starting to buckle – it was almost relieving, in a way. They’d break in, and shoot him, or cut his throat, or smash his skull in against the wall. And it would hurt, but only for a few seconds. He’d die, but the only worthwhile part of him had already rotted. Everything would finally be over, and he could finally stop breaking himself trying to recapture what he’d lost.

Breaking through took no time at all, now that they were trying – the frame broke before his locks did, shattering inward with an explosion of dust and splinters. Two figures were bursting through an instant latter – one screamed that they were FBI, but neither bothered with a badge, and the guns in their hands didn’t look like anything he’d seen a cop use on TV. Not that it mattered.

Edward opened his mouth to say something, pressed his feet on the damp carpet to stand up, closed his eyes as he prepared for the sound of a gunshot. Just get their attention, and it would be over. Just-

* * *

“Oh Eddie, you had so much potential.”

He jerked his head over his shoulder, searching for the source of the voice behind him – and just about made himself nauseous, as the world around him froze, and was painted over.

It could almost have been his work. Impressionistic watercolours, exaggerating every point of action and violence – the wood chips exploding out from the door, the would-be murderers charging in, light glinting off every knife and especially the strange, long-barrelled guns two of them held. Everything else faded into the background.

Edward bent forward and grabbed his own knees, almost hyperventilating while he tried to quell the urge to spew his empty stomach. He shut his eyes tight, only to discover that he could see right through the lids. And that the patch of stained carpeting beneath his stool seemed to shift the longer he looked at it, which didn’t exactly help his stomach.

Neither did the did the footsteps behind him, or the sudden weight as his long-lost draped herself over his shoulders and kept speaking as if he was in any state to respond. He tried very hard not to look at her, and at least save himself the discomfort of reconciling the closeness of her voice with the complete lack of heat or breath.

He couldn’t even remember the last time she’d bothered pretending to be human.

The first time he’d killed her, maybe. Or afterwards, when he realized it hadn’t been her, and she’d all but swooned over how he used the blood in his next masterpiece.

That memory was finally too much, and he wretched a stream of bile out onto the floor. His own sickness was as effected by the unreality around him as anything else, landing with a hiss as it seemed to burn the carpet like acid.

He barely had time to take a breath before Sophia flicked the side of his head – though honestly he cringed less from the impact than the sound of annoyance in her voice. “You weren’t listening to a word I said, were you? I swear, save a man’s life and he won’t even interrupt his wallowing to thank you.”

(Her real name wasn’t Sophia, obviously. Anymore than she’d been a classmate of his, or any of life stories she’d loved to regale everyone with when they gave her an opening. But she’d liked the name more than the face, and kept the one after discarding the other. He’d asked about it, later on, and gotten an indulgent laugh for his efforts. An inside joke, though he’d never figured out who for.)

It had been weeks since he’d last seen her, but Edward knew from experience when his oh-so-beloved muse wasn’t going to accept being ignored much longer. He swallowed to clear his throat before replying, still looking at the floor, and acutely aware of how rough and raw his voice was. And how she was still the last person he’d had a conversation with. Well, if she counted as one.

“You really think what you did was saving me?”

She had a laugh that echoed. Literally, now, disturbing the clouds of dust so beautifully caught in the air

“Maybe that’s your problem, you never learned how to take credit. This is the first time I’ve done anything, as a very special favour. Everything else? I gave you the inspiration you needed and the guidance you asked for, but it’s all been you babe.”

She stroked the back of his head as she continued, which would have been bad enough if her hand had only had five fingers.

“But hey, maybe I’ve just got you wrong. You know me, serial optimist, I see a green shoot in the parking lot and convince myself it can be an oak tree, if I give it a little help, and just end up with my very own overfertilized tumour of a blade of grass instead. But there’s so few of you monkeys that have any spark to you. Was I supposed to just let you just bury it and pretend to be another of the sheep until it’s time to rot? And hey, if it’s any consolation, you’re leaving a lot more cracks in the concrete than most.”

His head hurt. It usually did, trying to follow Sophia when she got introspective, or generally, and even more now. “What are you talking about? Was I supposed to be something? Have something? Wh-”

The fingers that had been running through his hair very suddenly had claws. Or seemed to, for as long as it took for Sophia to register her annoyance by digging them into his scalp. “Vision, Eddie. You were supposed to have vision. Perspective. To be able to walk alone under the stars, instead of cowering around your pathetic little campfire with everyone else.”

She sighed, pulled away her hand – he tried not to whimper from the pain. At least it didn’t fee like he was bleeding, somehow – and her voice grew softer, almost wistful.

“But that was too much to ask, wasn’t it? You’d look away from the fire and see the most beautiful things in the shadows and the smoke, hear them in the animals treading through the dark. But always as xenos, terrible or beautiful or both but oh so very alien.” She was smiling, he could tell without even having seen if she had a face, from the way the room seemed to brighten, all the colours growing warmer and more inviting. “And I haven’t exactly helped you get over that impression, have I?”

Eddie took a deep breath, and tried desperately to get his thoughts in order. Inwardly cringed at how lost and pathetic he sounded once he opened his mouth. “Then what was I supposed to have been doing? I thought the things I made were- were miracles. That’s what you called them. And I saw what they did. I made things like, like this-” he gestured out to the frozen room, at the three feds reduced to looming shadows, the only detail or colour to them their guns. “-and it wasn’t enough? I was screwing up the entire time?”

“Oh Eddie. You have got to get over yourself. Words like ‘supposed to’ are the whole problem. I offer you a key and you convince yourself that I’m measuring you for a different type of chain. My own fault for not getting to you younger, I guess. You’re just incapable of imagining anything but a nicer sort of prison.”

“But I’ve never lied to you. There’s just a tiny spark of reality in the dark, enough light to cast the shadow you paint for it. That shadow of truth is a miracle, in a world as sad as yours. And hey, most could-be diamonds in the rough I find burn out after one performance. And most of the rest can’t take the stress to even do that, and just prescribe themselves a .22 Aspirin when I try to help them. You though? More than a dozen paintings truer than the canvas they were painted on, or the empty little lives of anyone who looked at them.

I know you have a weak heart, so I tried to keep the messy bits from you once you gave me the tools to, let you focus on the Art. But oh Eddie you’re big. Sanguine? In the super’s office on the ground floor, and if you ever bothered to give him a name he’d trip over himself breaking them for you. Second Sin? It’s graffiti now, and there’s a whole gang that just about worships it. The Market? People have gotten lost in it.  Do you think death squads bother people without something special going on?”

She sighed again before continuing. “Well, had. And then you stopped. Hasn’t exactly been a good year for you, has it? I was hoping this would be a chrysalis, a nice bit of isolation to let you consider your own limitations, work your way out of this sad little doldrum you’ve gotten yourself stuck in. Instead you’re just rotting.”

She stood up and away from him, a process that seemed to involve significantly more joints than it should. When she walked out in front of him, he turned his head to avoid looking at her – which got a note of real contempt. “Really, Eddie? You aren’t exactly anyone’s model of chivalry. Fine, let me spare your sensibilities and find some modesty”

She reached out and grabbed his unshaven face with a human hand, forcing him to turn and look at her. She’d changed in less than an instant, into someone who’d never get a second look at a coffee shop or book store – aside from the eyes, anyway. Eddie would probably claw out his own before he looked her in the eyes again, no matter what face she was wearing. Even trying to avoid the, he couldn’t help but notice the swirling colors, or how they were already beginning to leak.

“The most promising candidate I’ve found in decades and he literally can’t even look me in the eyes. Really not doing anything to justify keeping the rest of your species around.” She snapped her fingers – which echoed, despite the apartment’s awful acoustics – and continued. “Listening Eddie? I said I was doing you a favour, didn’t I? Now I’ll admit part of that was hoping you wouldn’t need it after all, and the boys in blue breaking in your door would finally push you over the edge to enlightenment. But since you’re not about to walk out of the cave and start tanning on your own, I’m going to give you an option. Because I like you, and I’m nice like that.”

She gestured toward the three invaders at the door, frozen in tableaux – or, not quite frozen. They’d taken a few steps while he wasn’t paying attention, were halfway to pointing their guns at him, maybe. He wondered if any of this was more pleasant from their perspectives

“These fine lady and gentlemen are going to shoot you in the gut, then break every bone in both of your hands until you tell them every thing you’ve ever painted, every party trick you’ve ever pulled, every extra who got caught up in your story, and they are not going to believe you don’t know every single thing they ask. Once they’re satisfied, they’ll burn every thing you’ve ever done, erase every trace of anything that might potentially justify your existence. If you’re lucky, they’ll kill you, if not you’ll have the rare opportunity to wish you could die of smoke inhalation instead of bleeding out on the floor while your apartment burns around you. Enticing, right? That’s what happens if you don’t say yes.”

“And if I do you’ll whisk me away to safety, right?” He leaned into the bitterness as he replied, used it to try and hide the dead weight in his stomach. He’d never had a stomach for pain or torture or cruelty, not really. And Sophia’s gleeful enthusiasm talking about it was even harder to laugh off when it was about him instead of the latest small-minded critic or necessary source of paints.

“The sarcasm’s touching, but no. Sorry babe, your number’s up. My way’s gonna hurt a lot less, though. And you’ll have something to show for it. People will be fighting over your stuff for generations, trading lives and fortunes for one of your best works. All you’ve got to do is go out with a bang instead of a whimper. Small price to pay for a legacy, right?”

He couldn’t avoid looking at her eyes, now. They had a gravity to them, a pair of stars burning away the world around them. Which meant she wanted him to see, as tears like an oil slick poured from them, skin and bone boiling away beneath it. Still smiling as her whole body melted away,  the resulting warm and heavy liquid falling onto him, soaking him through before the puddle began spreading through the carpet around him. It wasn’t blood, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant Or stop him from screaming.

“You’re in good company. All the best artists only get discovered when they’re dead.”

* * *

The world was real again, and the people here to kill him moving.

It took him a second to notice them suddenly aiming those guns right at him and ordering him onto his knees, mid-scream as he was.

Mid-scream, and somehow, impossibly, holding a lighter. An ornate number, it’s silver casing full of engravings and symbolism a scholar of the Eldritch would have killed for the chance to puzzle out.

But fundamentally, it was a lighter. And Eddie Townsend was sitting in a pool of something that he thought was pretty much oil. And he cared about his legacy, and about his fingers, and about living up or down to expectations.

The lighter caught on the first try, and everything else did the instant the flame appeared.

Sophia had lied, when she said it would be painless.

The Tower

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell. It was the fault of men, they say, for daring to climb to Heaven; and not the fault of God, for creating Heaven.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; and in that tale I heard that it was very tall, and very finely built, and came very near to reaching Heaven. But also I was told when it fell all those who had worked on it found that they spoke in a thousand tongues, no two of them alike; and therefore I cannot be certain what story I would have heard, if I had heard it from another.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; and in that tale I heard that it was very tall, and very fine, and full of such marvels as should have been the wonders of the world, had they only survived. But the woman I heard it from had been once noble, and lived upon a bright balcony on the seventeen-hundredth floor, with red jasmine draping down, and I wondered what tale I would have heard from the builders above her, and the servants on the lower floors who had to climb so high, if they had possessed the tongues to speak.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; and in the tale I heard that it was very tall, and very well built, and that the techniques used in its construction have largely been lost in the days since its builders began to speak with a thousand tongues, and quarreled amongst themselves. But they say that in that part of the world the arches and the aqueducts are uncommonly fair and fine, and that the peoples there build the wonders of the world, so perhaps some knowledge was not lost, but perdured in the hearts of men.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; and in the tale I heard that all those who worked on it found that they spoke with a thousand tongues, and fell to quarreling amongst themselves, all the long night after the stones came tumbling down. But I have heard that in the morning one of the women who had dwelt near the foot of the tower came with grain she had gathered from the ruins of the kitchen, and with gestures and signs she organized the campfires near her into making breakfast for all those huddled in the wreck, and they ate a good meal there together, for all that they could make no conversation.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; but when I went to the place where it had been supposed to stand, I found it still standing there reaching upward to the heavens, with all within speaking a tongue that I had heard in no other place. And I wondered at the motivations of the criers and the writers of broadsheets, who had told me that men had failed when they built toward Heaven.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; but when I went to the place where it had been supposed to stand, I found it still standing there whole and empty, reaching upward very far into the clouds, to where I could not see. And I wondered at the motivations of the criers and the writers of broadsheets, who had told me that men had failed when they built toward Heaven.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; and in the tale I heard that all those who worked on it found that they spoke with a thousand tongues, and fell to quarreling amongst themselves, all the long night after the stones came tumbling down. And that is why I do not suppose it will matter if you explain yourself again, not now and not tonight, and why I am going to bed, and we will discuss this in the morning.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; and I heard that those who had lived in it spoke with a thousand tongues, and fell to quarreling among themselves. But a wise woman who had once lived in that place told me this: that it was not the fault of the fall that their speech had become divided, nor had they learned all their accents from disaster. Always, she said, those who dwelt on the seventeen hundredth floor had spoken other words, and thought other thoughts, than those who had lived on the seventeenth, for men must first re-form their minds if they would reach Heaven. And if there was any fault in what they had done, it was that they had climbed too swiftly, and given too little thought to maintaining the chain of translation that would allow them to read in time the letters from any of their fellows. And she would not tell me on what floor she herself had dwelt, for she said she had learned that it was not always good for men to know what thoughts were nearest Heaven.

*****

I heard a story, dearly beloved, about a tower that once fell; and I heard that those who had lived in it spoke with a thousand tongues, and fell to quarreling among themselves. But a wise woman who had once lived in that place told me that verily it still stood, and the tales I had heard were only those related by the men and women who had for some reason or other departed the tower, and forgotten that it had always been the case that those who dwelt on the seventeen hundredth floor had spoken other words, and thought other thoughts, than those who had lived on the seventeenth, for men must first re-form their minds if they would reach Heaven. Therefore if you would go, let us go; and if you would climb, then let us climb, so long as we ascend in the same time, and learn together the tongue of angels; and if you would rest then let us rest, for men are not always right, when they imagine that they know what thoughts are nearest Heaven.

Simon Pietersz Verelst — Poppies, roses, carnations and other flowers. details. 1644-1721

Lady of shallot. Lady of onion. Lady of garlic. Lady of chives.

its 4am and I have no control over what i draw

late 19th century perfume bottles

Pays Basque, France

PAPER MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 2019 ‘CROWN & COUNTRY’

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Model: Teddy Quinlivan

Teddy Quinlivan for Dior S/S18 Couture

El-ahrairah

An ammonite that has been fossilized with pyrite. A golden golden mean.

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