#c:lensa

nettle birthday!!! everyone cheer and clap for babygirl problems disease

so incredibly back in the nettle sauce

people always gave me love, others were never to blame after all

i feel like it’s potentially relevant i keep track of these all in a discord channel called nettle spiralling. family portrait of nettle nolastname

@july-19th-club / my nieces is probably the reincarnation of shirley jackson, cj hauser with notes / all about love, bell hooks / where angels fear to tread, e m forster / antichrist, the 1975 / elisabeth hewer / haunted epistemologies, laura westengard / letters to a young poet, rainer maria rilke / sam sifton / the anthropocene reviewed, john green

[Image Description: Ten pictures of text.

1: “simply cannot resist what i call the little mermaid or the tin man or the pinocchio plot, the one about a character who is either inhuman or human but outside in some way, constantly searching for whatever it is that they consider to be the quintessential proof of humanity, preoccupied by it so deeply that they fail to realise the proof is in the act and fact of the search itself”

2: “”What does it mean for the structure of your life to feel menacing? To be imprisoned within it? To feel like it might kill you?”

Haunting is an act of care, care is an act of haunting. Haunting is formed between the trauma, mothers inflict on their daughters.”

3: “We can never go back. I know that now. We can go for-ward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing.” The first three sentences are highlighted in red.”

4: “I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it - and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die - I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there.”

5: “And I swear there's a ghost on this island / And his hands, all covered in blood / And my wife inquired of understanding / But of course, my dear, you can't

She said, How can I relate to somebody who doesn't speak?/ I feel like I'm just treading water

Is it the same for you? / Is it the same for you?”

6: “I want to be eaten alive. I want / to feel wanted.”

7: “cultural anxieties and desires, allowing”for a whole range of specific monstrosities to coalesce in the same form.” The excesses of monstrosity and the hybridity of the living dead help visualize naturalized oppressive structures, making those structures uncanny and therefore intervening in the architecture of oppression. Both haunting and sadomasochism appear in queer thought as expressions of queer temporality that expose a particular type of traumatic temporality. Haunting manifests the swirl-ing, fractured, intersecting temporality of ongoing low-level trauma, not just a single event popping through into the present but a disorienting and overwhelming storm of traumatic intrusion.

The traumatic gothic shadow cast on queer theory is not always made explicit however.” The initial sentence fragment and queer temporality are highlighted in blue. The penultimate sentence is highlighted in purple.

8: “You must realise that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall.”

9: “Above all, cook for someone else. Take a moment to prepare food not simply because you’re hungry, but because cooking is an act that makes others feel better. And making the lives of others better is why we are here.”

10: A photo of a page of a book, some lines are highlighted in yellow throughout. “would like that, to show it your belly. There’s something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world.

I’m scared to even write this down, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I’m hit where I am earnest, I will never recover.

It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I’m just scared that if I show the world my belly it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude glass.

But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing.”

1987, paul guest / timefighter, lucy dacus / k.a applegate / lucille clifton / ganymede, jericho brown / the sorrow festival, erin slaughter / @transmonstera / the moths, mary oliver / regarding the röttgen pietà, elle emerson / @inkskinned

[Image Description: Ten images, mostly of text on white backgrounds.

1: “Some nights I wake and everything hurts a little. / It is amazing how long a ruined thing will burn.”

2: “You talk like you know the walls are thin / And I don’t mind if you don’t mind me listening / And I’m tired of all these wires / If I go far enough / Will they not follow us?

And I fight time / It won in a landslide / I’m just as good as anybody / I’m just as bad as anybody”

3: “People don’t understand the word ruthless. They think that it means ‘mean.’ It’s not about being mean. It’s about seeing the bright, clear line that leads from A to B. The line that goes from motive to means. Beginning to end. It’s about seeing that bright, clear line and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you can see the solution.” The text is dark red.

4: “maybe i should have wanted less / maybe i should have ignored the bowl in me / burning to be filled / maybe i should have wanted less”

5: “I mean, don't you want God / To want you? Don't you dream / Of someone with wings taking you / Up?”

6: “& if I present my body as sacrifice I can finally walk away from it.”

7: "your god doesn't want to kill me he wants to fuck me" the words kill and fuck are censored with red praying hands. the text is on a background collage of various depictions of saint sebastian. the background is black and there are stars decorating the page. the overlay is red.

8: “And anyway / I was so full of energy. / I was always running around, looking / at this and that.

If I stopped / the pain / was unbearable.”

9: “No one is watching / So why does it have to be beautiful? / You, in pain, are no closer to god than / You, in the drive thru or / You, checking your email or / You, holding your own hand.”