@letterpoems / letterpoems.tumblr.com
Do you have anyway you could pair me up with a pen pal?
hello, lovely nonnie!! it’s been a while since we’ve been active but thank you for your interest. that said, i’m going to post this - if there’s anyone who’s still hanging around here who wants to participate in this project, please reply to this post or reblog this post with a comment, so that we can gauge the interest (& if there is interest, we can definitely pair you up with someone!)
much love to you <3
they say, if you don’t keep it a secret it won’t come true / but we’ve been wishing on stars & for the sun to come through / and pierce the ash clouds of the future we dreamed in our youth. she says there is bit by bit still reason to grin, to dance; we are smiling at fluttering vermilion and falling fire / pulling our collars higher, the warmth of a dream blooming in reverse to a sapling of hope. and yet yesterday night the moon was fighting for her right to self-determination / and hope, in any language, is self-sacrificing to the tipping point of tidal waves / i think hunger pains and deja vu speak for me more than they both used to / and all this means i cannot escape the past tense save to say i am trying my best. at this turn of the seasons, white clouds ignited & ripped apart as they slid toward the scarlet horizon / the monarch butterflies have made their way south / and my mouth caged my laughter as my eyes filled with salt water because i was crying out of joy at what the television showed: possibility, and kindness, and the sun and moon watching over their child earth, where everything is pretty and alive in their blue-green-golden home / you say, you will all be happy again one day / and i say, the day came. even if we are cities, states, and seas apart / your promises are ripples in the ocean: they reach.
— for @flowercryptid, with my whole heart. part of the @letterpoems project.
dear captain lovelace,
don’t let it get you down. we were talking about things the other day, sunlight, forests & all that. i’m listening to a song that sounds like people on the moon playing bass guitars. i’m humming along to the beat of my heart & sure it’s a broken record but isn’t that what makes life so compelling? the ugliness? we were talking about the greys. i would’ve shown you all my splinters. cut my skin to show you that my blood isn’t golden anymore, but it used to be, a few years ago, you know?
you’re blessed the same way banyan trees are, you belong in the world like wildflowers growing thru pavement cracks and ice-creams in summer and prayers murmured in the quiet of night when everything feels just a little bit ethereal. i’m sorry for the sadness, and i know grief tends to destroy. but i love you and you are strong, i know this. take the resilience woven into your body, like grass on riverbanks. let it illuminate you.
i know this doesn’t help, but i befriended all the lonely. made it my asset. someone told me, mockingly, that i’d never have any friends. i laughed, the sound of a bell tolling in the distance. “you’re not saying anything i don’t already know,” i wanted to say. instead, i said, “i have me. and that’s one person who you’ll never have.”
it felt good. it really did. yours, someone between goddess and monster.
PS if you ever need an ear, i’ve got two attached to my head. there are probably ears of corn in the fridge, i can get those too, for luck. but i promise you, i’ll listen. lend you my two ears and nineteen years and we’d burn candles made of some minerals from saturn or something and nothing would be able to hurt us, not there, not here, not in this safe place we’ve made.
for @arckhaic / from @antigoneblue // i’m not sure if you’re still sad, but i hope this helps if you are <3
i was thinking
(and you know how dangerous that is,
but today they were only happy thoughts.)
about the mail system and the point of packages
which didn’t they used to call parcels?
or maybe that’s just in England.
but the point of a package
(if i ever get to it.
seems i’m always getting sidetracked.)
is to keep things together isn’t it?
and that’s the point of a matched set
and i wonder if it’s the point of friends.
see a teacup by itself
(and now i’m on to tea-time,
and i’m still not English.)
isn’t much use,
because all the tea-things
belong together.
and things go together
so that they don’t get lost.
—————
love letter to a dear friend
rosie —
my last-period class is windowless. in these mornings that salt their tongues with wind and mellow into the sticky-sweet afternoons of almost-summer, i tuck flower stems into the eyelets of my boots. apple and peach blossoms wilt by noon, but the sprays of lilac
only turn a darker purple. even in rooms sealed tight, you can open a gate to the season’s air and find a glimpse of green and growing things. the sky was such an infinitely soft blue yesterday evening, the clouds whispering blessings during their slow meander across the world.
they made me think of girls in dresses as frothy and white as freshly laid snowdrifts, of red rose petals dripping from corsages to land on pale floors. of how i collected those errant paint-splatters, pressed them flat between the time-weighted pages
of fantasy novels. together is a word with so much history. so many stories tucked into its syllables alongside the thin-stemmed sprigs of dried forget-me-nots. the sky knows how to match the flowers to her hue, how to time her rising sun to the blossoming. open your windows
and perhaps we, too, can learn.
— for @rose-curves-and-cardioids, with love. part of the @letterpoems project.
dear adira, writing like yours is so brutally honest but also painful. it’s like dissection and theoretically, shouldn’t be beautiful. there’s nothing beautiful about ruin but the way you write wounds is vivid. dear adira, you’re an artist with a large scope, i know. i know. i see you draw and photograph and catalogue the extent to which the world left you weary. your art is profound, but i am sorry at the unfairness of it. i wish i had the strength to tell you that you do not deserve any of it – the wounds that make your art pull its punch. dear adira, i don’t know you, but i know your poetry. not very much of it perhaps. only bits and pieces, only what you choose to show us. i wish things were easier for you. you deserve to be happy and at peace. i wish you could’ve seen us, in 2016 sending links to ‘civil war sickness’ back and forth, talking about our favourite parts. letting it make our heads spin. i wish you knew how many people read your work and grow stronger because of it – because of solidarity. because it takes strength to say “look, something fucked up happened to me and it was not beautiful. it was not beautiful. it was the ugliest thing i’d ever seen.” dear adira, thank you for being here. thank you for sharing your work with us. thank you for everything. i don’t have better words than these but i hope you understand that i will always support you however i can. to the best of my abilities. that i believe in you & am rooting for you. dear adira, take care. sending love.
for @adirabennett
heartbreak isn’t an aesthetic and i’m so tired // 30th May 2018 also uhhhhhh this is my poem and my trauma so if you plagiarise it you aren’t just Trash, you are at the Bottom of the Trash & Scum Hierarchy™
darling, i’m sorry that this month has decided to swallow you and spit you up. to corrode you. to take you in all rainbow glory and watch you fall. the pain and the aches in my sternum hush it up but
each time is the same. remember when we were eating cold pizza on your bedroom floor and listening to africa by toto? you say you’re scared god won’t love you if you kiss a boy. i say “god put you on this earth. god gave you this heart, full of love. god meant for it to be this way.”
i’m sorry that we can’t breathe freely outside. i’m sorry that i can’t imagine kissing her in any way that doesn’t end in violence. doesn’t end in this feeling of the witchhunt. feeling like you’re naked in a hall of mirrors. something in me that couldn’t be cleaned. something in me that feels like rot. like blood in my mouth.
i didn’t put that disgust in myself. love is pure. it should be. it should be. oh, it hurts.
so we’re stuck in the closet. so it’s dark here. so we can pretend the glitter makes it worth it, like stars at night. so we can say the velvet is soft like meadows. but can we go outside?
we can never come out. you’ve heard that old wives’ tale, have you not? out of the frying pan, into the fire? it’s the same all round, it’s the same warped agenda. out of the closet, into the casket. destiny and fate too busy watching us endure this pain older and deeper than ourselves, bleeding through our ancestors. until we are free to love, we are not free to be anything.
aren’t they toxic? one day i will get so drunk i will be able to kiss a boy and pretend it’s love. i will stand on the tabletop in jeans and a bra, and i will sing africa by toto. and when i go home in tears, everyone will say it is beautiful.
antigoneblue, FOR ANYONE IN A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY WHERE SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIPS STILL HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO RUIN YOUR LIFE FOREVER
quinn,
everything has changed. i say this smiling & shaking my head in disbelief, because after all these misspoken dreams and palm- muffled screams, i’m not afraid of past things one bit. they all fit under pages like the petals that wilted off lily and daisy stems; they don’t
dry quite as pretty as the roses, but not all memories can be the right kind of red. my last-day class was cut to a half; too many false farewells happened still. and that night my friends spilled water at dinner, and that morning i avoided thinking too much, and i say this to mean
i tried to make it seem like not an end. i asked that boy the question i wanted to for years—is your favorite color still blue? — while handing him a marker to sign my yearbook. even if it took longer, i would have waited to make sure the end was a good one.
overhead and underfoot the cicadas and tall grass are spilling their whispers, asking with grace if they get to live again after summer is over. perhaps molts into promise, and if lies are the easiest things to swallow, it’s because bitter never outshines sweet. savor the season’s heat and hue;
someday, soon, we’ll taste the truth.
— for @flowercryptid, with love, as part of the @letterpoems project
hello i’m having a very difficult time right now (panic attack that just Won’t Go Away) and your words are always a source of comfort to me, can i ask for a couple words of solace or gentle encouragement?
dove, sweet friend, i’m so sorry to find you at this late hour but i’ve been resting the way i hope you did last night - quietly, gently, well. most days i too find my breath elusive (by which i mean “difficult to catch,” but “elusive” is so much more romantic) and those times are often and scary; “scary” a little like the monsters i used to see in the shadows on my bedroom walls at night, and yet, a decade later i couldn’t be less afraid of them because the only thing you can do with monsters is befriend them. so i befriended them. every night i watch the “monsters” on my bedroom walls tell stories in shadow and light, and when i lose my breath i’m all the more grateful for when it fills my lungs again. i’m sorry for your breathlessness and i’m sorry for your fear, i can sense how quiet, gentle, well, the good in you is, and i can tell you’re undeserving of empty lungs. but it’ll always pass and even through it, your monsters, your strength, your (shadowy) guardian angels, are right beside you. i promise x
lover, this is a dead dog summer all brittle- too easily made sharp. i am one thousand, four hundred, & thirty three miles away from you & still- still i think of the knife of your smile & my lungs become a fire
i do not tell you about the pain settling low between the valley of my hips again i do not tell you about the coughing or the old ache in my spine or the blood, & still-
you treat me like i am half-broken already, half-lion & half-corpse, your voice all laughter & rich like honey you tell me i’m beautiful & for the first time i believe you.
nine pm. july sunset. i have the taste of bonfire on my tongue & you are in my mind again i pretend you & i are under the same stars & we are both hungry. i buy postcards & think of you, thinking i really wish you were here & still i cannot tell you the truth.
prayer to a brown-eyed girl | [x]
for charlie —
i wish you were there to see it near the top of the mountains: the sun caught the water just right and rainbow fluttered in cloud form, for less than a minute until the wind tore it past and pushed me forward.
(there was a singing in my head with every step uphill; i’d climb taller mountains just to hear that sound again. i hope the water droplets know i’m proud of them.)
the moon can send the message for us, with seashells found at the cusp of the ocean. she left it, warned us, handed the flags and bandages at once, quoting salt water cures all and knowing we know what salt does to a wound.
i’ve always reminded myself that life is a sine wave. up, down. good days, bad days. but a tangent curve? brilliant. i have to start saying that instead, and stop pretending that my favorite tree is unlike me, just skeleton and skin and stuff between.
claim what you’ve made yours and nothing stands in your way anymore. the glowing glory of gold and blue, the lopsided equation of sun and moon, it’s all, finally, marching beside you.
love, rosie
(in reply to the glory of the sun by @partlycharlie)
“let’s go to mars, i said, and your solar-wind eyes only made me long harder for the universe. let’s build a cottage on the asteroid belt — with a red-tiled roof like you and i both like. let’s vacation on saturn; watch magellan lightning catch and refract on the beetle-back windows of our honeymoon cruiser. let’s go as far as the fusion will allow us — until all signal is lost and we are anchorless. let’s rest there, intertwined in the dark — bodies outmorphing our humanity, at last at peace.”
— starlust, or a poem for my wife lianna schreiber, june 2018
darling, the season hasn’t yet named herself summer but i already recognize her ways. until the days warmed i always said i love this time of year, but now it’s june with the wind so choked & humid that all the birds are drowning in midair. on all the other calendar pages i write poems that praise the softness of summer but then the sun hits & here we are. here’s the memories of the harshness of the sidewalk / the roughness of scabbed-over skin / a boy saying it would be worth it to see you scared. i’ll admit i haven’t ridden any rollercoasters in years, but i remember being breathless, metal denting the underside of every knuckle. june belongs to a girl with fingernails as sharp as my own & even though i won’t say her name i still remember her face. immortalized it, even. dried the image on the windowsill, though it wrinkled up when it rained & i didn’t latch the glass closed in time. what else sustains water damage like that? her & i, we used to play spoons with pairs of scissors in the centre. if spring is indecision, summer is promise, putting me to sleep & pollinating for leverage. there is no sadness here, or if there is, it is only the knowledge that i am relearning the angle of sun-glare on knifepoint gazes. how vicious these smiles are / how viscous this air. every time i take a breath, june’s laugh is an unwilling expansion in my lungs. but i’m breathing, still. i love this season, still. i hope she earns it before she evaporates.
— for @autoenyo. part of the @letterpoems project.
hi! i’d like to request a poem about/from a young girl in 1700’s who's trying to be an artist in midst of the chaotic political atmosphere in France because of the revolution. she flees to italy and manages to become a famed artist and writer but she still longs to come home. ty :)
ma colombe,
this cantillation is now feathered
in the vibrato of a passerotta,
in the monsoon of dimpled sapodillas,
in the blush of a foreign accent rouged
upon my native tongue —
indigoes of a bisected wishbone
bartered
for each velveteen wingstroke;
pearlescent in quadraturo,
vermilion in staccato,
sinew turned into textured bourdeaux —
yet, the pulverisation of bioluminescent fish
on Venetian shores pigment the Marseilles skyline
in peacocked ultramarines
& the chokehold of nostalgia
is a sirensong
wilfully rupturing my heart
on a fisherman’s hook,
desperate to splatter itself home.
after all, the desire of every bird
is to be cradled
in the very seams of the sky,
it has relentlessly
stitched its lifeline into —
& my unraveling is due,
tua passerotta
notes: 1. ma colombe = My dove in French 2. passerotta = An Italian metaphor for anyone who’s “learning to fly,” passerotto/a translates to “little sparrow.” 3. quadraturo = famous style of painting ceilings to give a 3D effect, within the Venetian, 18th century, Rococo movement.
