cherry melancholia

Amy Sillman [USA] (b. 1955) ~ ‘Ocean 2’, 1997. Oil on canvas (177.8 x 152.4 cm).

“do not give up on me us you them / lucky lucky number number number” Joan Retallack, this Wednesday @poetry__project (from Pom2 issue 2)

Oh the ghost of the heart…

The Collectors- Mark Bryan; 2011

Maja Klaassens  

3d renaissance hair bow by rohan mirza

You entered at the badlands with your hair in a bun. You missed a certain moon. You prevailed through a chilly reception from your new friends, stunning yourself with visions. I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years and where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand. We were in stasis for 17 days and when I woke yours was the first face that I saw. I didn’t care that our disease was incurable because it was only you and I that incubated it. You were a governess and I was an energy field. You drank vegetable bullion, suffering in solitude. I wanted to bloom in a field of toxic dust and you talked me out of it. In your spare time you sewed a blanket, your strange femininity like a hybrid flower where I was confined. I cut a lock of your hair with a Neolithic stone and with it I made a fire. You put a handful of worms in my mouth to keep me alive. You put yourself in between a planet and missile. You fell in love with a computer-generated father of two and broke his heart. You were frightened. I told you I could be trusted. I escaped in a tiny ship. I had a plan. You gave a speech. You wanted to gather energy from a cloud of purple light and you were secretly all along assembling your manifesto through a series of captain’s logs. Once, there were two of you and you each wanted to die for the other’s greater good. You fought over the other’s right to live. You respected and contradicted yourself. At the last minute of the self-destruction sequence you died and you also continued on. You wanted to brush a strand of hair away from your face but you didn’t. Your arms were supplemental. I saw you in a dream intruding on another’s dream with diplomacy. I told them to take you away at once and then shook without you in my presence. I wanted to live with you on an uninhabited planet and build you a house. You wanted to see Bloomington Indiana again. You look good in red. Once, you woke up beside a God and were furious at his presumptuousness. You wore a scarf of alien silk. Became repulsed by lavishness and empty hedonism. I was in a bad part of Brooklyn and you were in my mind internalizing sadness. Making scary situations sexy. Making lingerie on shimmering bedspreads militant. You came into my mind and I made you more tea we talked about the past. I said too much— the sort of noise one makes with a flask; cognitive behavioral therapy barking like a seal in a mid-sized pool of my brain. The more I drank the more deliberately I defended my haircut —which lead me to family—those broken snipers in their unpeopled region of space—each shot silent, each bullet like a shooting star across a prehistoric sky— I was evolving. Picturing myself prevailing through a series of obstacles equal to iridescent natural disaster, my head stuck in a banister of longing. I stood a little behind you taking notes. You sent me on a secret mission every night. And there was a beautiful gash on your cheek.

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio, how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable. Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we’ll never get used to it. - Richard Siken

purple brick path ✿ by 0o_c6x on twt

The cut on my mouth was shaped like a country; I showed it to you and you ran into the trees. Maybe the trees needed you, or maybe you needed the trees. The cut on my mouth was shaped like a country; it bled until the rain said, That’s enough. It bled until the rain said, That’s enough now. It bled, the cut on my mouth shaped like a country; I showed it to you and you ran into the trees.