the most astounding fact

[redcheekdays]

i once saw a scientist
on television.
and she was speaking generally
about science things
(being a scientist and knowing science things
etc.)
and, speaking generally
i am not a science
person,
and while i respect them,
i do not have much interest
in scientists
or science things.
so i went to switch the channel
at the precise moment that the presenter sitting beside the scientist asked:
what,
in your opinion,
is the most ASTOUNDING fact
about the universe
?
and this stopped me.
because it is not often that television presenters ask such interesting questions,
and the scientist was pursing her lips in a thoughtful way that made me think
i wanted to hear her answer
to the interesting question.
after a pause,
she did not look directly at the
camera,
but directly at the presenter.

did you know,
she said,
that there are atoms in your body.
the presenter laughed.
of course,
he said.
what else would my body be made of?
well,
said the scientist,
and i did not need to look at the television screen to know
she was smiling.
do you know where those atoms came from?

well,
said the presenter.
and he did not say anything else.
i snickered from my place in the armchair
and the scientist smiled again.

the most ASTOUNDING fact that i have ever known,
she said,
is not a fact, specifically,
but the story of every atom on this planet.
the ones that make up the grass and the sea and the sand and the forests and the human
body.
these atoms came
from stars.

the presenter sat forward and so did i.

stars,
continued the scientist,
are mortal
like humans.
they die,
and, in their later years,
are unstable.
it pains me a little to say it, but a star’s death
is far more dramatic than a human’s.
is it? asked the presenter.
the scientist was looking at him still,
and i felt strongly as though i was listening in on a very private
conversation.

it is, the scientist nodded. the stars
i am referring to,
she said,
collapsed and exploded a very long time ago, and scattered their enriched guts across
the entire universe.
here, she paused, and her words caught in my mind in a way that made me wonder
if she was a scientist
or a poet.
their guts, she said whilst sipping from a glass of water, were splayed across every
inch
of time and space.
these guts were made of the
fundamental ingredients
of life and existence.
carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and all the
rest of it.
all in the bellies of these stars that flung themselves across the universe in protest when it was their time to die.

and then? asked the presenter.
the scientist’s lips quirked upwards. and then, she said.
it all became parts of gas clouds.
ones that condense and collapse and will form our next solar systems -
billions of stars with billions of planets to orbit them.
and these planets have the ingredients of life sewed into the very fabric
of their own lives.

so, she said, smile still playing on her lips -
where do your atoms come from?
from those gas clouds, said the presenter.
no, said the scientist.
from those stars.

every atom, every molecule, every inhale and exhale and beat of your heart, is traceable
to the crucibles that cooked life itself.
and you are sitting here and so am i and so are your viewers at home,
and we’re all in the universe, aren’t we?
yes, said the presenter.
but i’ll tell you what’s even better, the scientist smiled wider.
the universe is in us. your atoms and my atoms and your camera men’s atoms came from those stars. you’re connected and relevant without even having to try. you are made of stardust and the fabric of the universe.
that is the most ASTOUNDING fact
i can tell you.
the presenter smiled and the scientist smiled wider and i smiled too,

and later i switched the channel to something less scientific
and wondered if i should feel small,
tiny and insignificant in relation to the stars that collapsed and exploded and
threw themselves everywhere.
and that is how my mother found me,
sitting on the sofa.
and she asked me what was
wrong,
and i said,
nothing. i’m just a lot smaller than stars are.
my mother is very literal woman. as such, her natural response was:
of course you’re not. don’t you see how small stars are?
that’s only from a distance,
i said.
maybe you’re looking at yourself from a distance too, she said.

and she left the room and it is years later now, but i still
think about the scientist and what she said
and my mother and what she said
and i still see the presenter on television.
and i still think that the stars are very big
but now i think,
they are in me.
so i am big too.

from Psychic

[redcheekdays]

Maybe having thoughts means you can’t just drink all night
To silence them would mean something
Maybe it means something

from States of being

[redcheekdays]

No I don’t believe in love anymore
But I do believe in being
And being known and not known
And being seen and not seen

from fiona apple & i watch netflix

[redcheekdays]

i want to watch a girl on fire with ruin on her lips.
i want to see everything burn.

from Fireflies

[redcheekdays]

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed.
a hunger that isn’t hunger
but something like fear...

from I Wanted to Be the Knife

[redcheekdays]

All I hear straight women say is
I love MY vampire
mine is Fine.

not an elegy for Mike Brown

[redcheekdays]

I am sick of writing this poem
but bring the boy. his new name
his same old body. ordinary, black
dead thing. bring him & we will mourn
until we forget what we are mourning
& isn’t that what being black is about?
not the joy of it, but the feeling
you get when you are looking
at your child, turn your head,
then, poof, no more child.
that feeling. that’s black.
\
think: once, a white girl
was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan war.
later, up the block, Troy got shot
& that was Tuesday. are we not worthy
of a city of ash? of 1000 ships
launched because we are missed?
always, something deserves to be burned.
it’s never the right thing now a days.
I demand a war to bring the dead boy back
no matter what his name is this time.
I at least demand a song. a song will do just fine.
\
look at what the lord has made.
above Missouri, sweet smoke.

from Into the Wildfire: Mourning Departures

[redcheekdays]

Is it too aggressive of me to say
I want to rip the past into shreds?
I cannot change how I feel,
and you cannot change
how catastrophically this ended.

I do not want to remember —
not you, not how my heart
heals differently now,
not the gaps in the way
I approach people since you.
I want you to stop existing in the past
as easily as you stopped existing in my future.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

most importantly love
like it’s the only thing you know how
at the end of the day all this
means nothing
this page
where you’re sitting
your degree
your job
the money
nothing even matters
except love and human connection
who you loved
and how deeply you loved them
how you touched the people around you
and how much you gave them

from Why Things Burn

[redcheekdays]

A girl never knows when she’s gonna need
to soak up some blood.

Little Red Plum

[redcheekdays]

Crisis in the night.
My heart a little red plum
in my mouth. Glowing
its small fire in the dark.
How you, hand on my breast,
open my little animal cage
to watch me burn, eyes
marvelling at the birds
that rush out. My voice rising
red balloons in the air. My hands
find a bright cardinal bleeding
through your shirt, my name
spreading softly on your tongue.
Swift cherry vine galloping,
stitching warm skin to skin.
I reach for you, reach into
the feathers of the dark,
wanting to stay here, wanting
to press each hour into vellum
so tomorrow I may search
and find our little blossom
still unfurling there. I slip slowly
into your light, kiss my red
plum into your mouth.
Here. I give you all of me
in this little pink cup: hot mouthfuls
of fevergrass, of wild Jamaican
mint. Here, in the shadow of this
hothouse room, a red hibiscus
blooms and blooms.

Madame la Guillotine

[redcheekdays]

Angela Carter suggests that
Bluebeard’s last wife did not know
she was stepping into the lion’s den.
I beg to differ.
I was his unmaking,
I was his damning,
I will speak.

What can I say other than that
when I saw myself reflected in his eyes
I saw what I could become?
Saw my corruption,
my compromise,
my never ending thirst?
So I went,
and after that first night,
I fell into a bottomless pit of hunger.

He was confused.
He had not realised I knew.
When he gave me his keys,
I went to the room straightaway,
laid myself bare on the table and waited for his return.
He yelled himself hoarse for his darling wife
he did not think to look for me there
and yet there I was.

Come, he did.
I was virginal
I was sacrificial
and now the lamb had really walked into the wolf’s lair.

Down went the blade!
And a string of red rubies around his neck!
I licked my chops.
Nothing sexier than a woman
who eats her meat.

Two-Minute Personality Test

[redcheekdays]

What’s the kindest thing you almost did? Is your fear of insomnia stronger than your fear of what awoke you? Are bonsai cruel? Do you love what you love, or just the feeling? Your earliest memories: do you look though your young eyes, or look at your young self? Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent? Do you walk on moving walkways?

Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong as you were doing it? Would you trade actual intelligence for the perception of being smarter? Why does it bother you when someone at the next table is having a conversation on a cell phone? How many years of your life would you trade for the greatest month of your life? What would you tell your father, if it were possible? Which is changing faster, your body, or your mind? Is it cruel to tell an old person his prognosis?

Are you in any way angry at your phone? When you pass a storefront, do you look at what’s inside, look at your reflection, or neither? Is there anything you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it? If you could be assured that money wouldn’t make you any small bit happier, would you still want more money? What has been irrevocably spoiled for you?

If your deepest secret became public, would you be forgiven? Is your best friend your kindest friend? Is it any way cruel to give a dog a name? Is there anything you feel a need to confess? You know it’s a “murder of crows” and a “wake of buzzards” but it’s a what of ravens, again? What is it about death that you’re afraid of? How does it make you feel to know that it’s an “unkindness of ravens”?“

Good Bones

[redcheekdays]

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Bon Iver: "Holocene"

[redcheekdays]

There's actually no such thing as an adult. That word is a placeholder. We never grow up. We're not supposed to. We're born and that's it. We get bigger. We live through great storms. We get soaked to the bone. We realize we're waterproof. We strive for calm. We discover what makes us feel good. We do those things over and over. We learn what doesn't feel good. We avoid those things at all cost. Sometimes we come together: huge groups in agreement. Sometimes we clap and dance. Sometimes we look like a migration of birds. We need to remind ourselves -- each other -- that we're mere breaths. But, and this is important, sometimes we can be magnificent, to one person, even for a short time, like the perfect touch -- the first time you see the ocean from the middle. Like every time you see the low, full moon. We keep on eating: chewing, pretending we know what's going on. The secret is that we don't. We don't, and don't, and don't. Each day we're infants: plucking flower petals, full of wonder.

mending the eyes of a hummingbird

[redcheekdays]

The boy
loves me but he holds my hand too hard. My skin splits
and separates, tuned glass instrument in the grip of an untaught
player. My mother loves me without satisfaction, I am too much hers
yet too much not. My father loves me like salt. I want to be loved
as if I am light, an untouchable presence, a silent, passing grace.
Under hot running water, my body becomes alien, waxes
strange and brilliant, learns to leave all gaze behind, if only for
a short while. The riverbed is filled with teeth. I don’t want to dive,
I never learned how to swim, I scream but find myself neck deep in
anyway and swiftly sinking. Arms outstretched like a holy word
I reach the whiteness. It greets me not, instead tears holes
into the creases of my neck and knees. My head rests
on some primordial creature’s fossilized fang. A hummingbird cries as it
falls from a swaying leaf. I haven’t ever dared to ask but I always wonder
if God is merely death without ending. A multiplying massacre
of souls that never knew what to do with love yet always found
themselves with an excess of it. I love
Everything but only if Everything does not expect Anything of me.

salty (extended play)

[redcheekdays]

i find you embedded in the earth permeating it like salt
you add a fine white spice to my diet like salt
at night you glisten the hot surface of my skin like salt
you send my blood pounding through my arteries like salt

you stick to my fingers and i lick you off like salt
at my feet you crumple into a little spill of bad luck like salt
you symbolize the gritty edges of my outrage like salt
i grind you into my wounds and you bite like salt

Daily Bread

[redcheekdays]

Listen,
the year is gone. I know
nothing of my country. I write things
down. I build a life & tear it apart
& the sun keeps shining.

Survivor’s Guilt

[redcheekdays]

Tell me how wrong it is: I’ve made a home of your mouth. I shiver for this. I asked for this. Take out your sharp like the good silverware. The night stretched thin but I would never force you to stay. We were believers once, to something taken up residence below the ribs. I thought I knew my survivor’s guilt, the day we ran out of hot water. How we were always running out of things, like what to say & time & yellow light.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

The daughter is sad. I’m so sad says the daughter. Why are you sad? asks the mother. The daughter doesn’t know. The days go by. The daughter isn’t getting better and the mother worries, frets, paces. The mother isn’t a doctor, she’s a poet, so she brings home a book. I’m too sad to read says the daughter but it’s not for reading, it’s for figuring: it’s a thesaurus. You can be as sad as you need to be says the mother but you must know what kind of sad you are. Are you sad-lonely, sad-desperate, sad-lacking-in-faith? The daughter sits at her desk and looks at the words she has written on the sheet of paper. It’s not that the words are any less true than she imagined, it’s not that they’re smaller than she thought, but they’re limited, they have boundaries, they’re finite, and she’s bigger than they are, surprisingly bigger and more vast than these words on the page, written in her own hand. Go figure. She starts to feel better.

Reflections

[redcheekdays]

Forgive me my grief
that spans out acres.
I have love the size of
a church, & no one to
give it to.
Do I cut my hair?
Do I harvest all of my beginnings?
I touch my teeth with my tongue
to remember the sharp can fade.
Someone learns my name.
I fall asleep.

WHERE DO I START THE POEM?

[redcheekdays]

Where do I start the poem?
By putting my thumb on a bruise?
From where the ache is just out of reach?

HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

[redcheekdays]

Say it like an amputee, each letter a prosthetic
limb. Say it because sometimes two just aren’t
enough; sometimes you need an entire bouquet
of hands to carry all the love, say it because the
love always slips through your thousand fingers
anyway, like sand, like floss, like water, like a
song. Say goodness. Say grace. Say thank
you for holding my hair. Thank you for turning
my sick, sleeping body on its side. You held
me when I couldn’t stay upright in the storm of
myself. Say sorry for the mess. Say goldenrod.
Say goose-feather. Say it with all eight muscles
of the tongue, as if their leaving was a soft
language that didn’t bite back. Say loving you
has been the greatest kindness. Say I’ve carried
your salt in my wounds. Cradled your heart in
my gullet like a prayer, a sacred thing I was too
afraid to want or release; say I release you.
I deliver you now into the arms of the one who
will love you best. Say beauty. Say bless. Say
their name, one perfect time while it still belongs
to you. Say it even when they refuse to say
yours, your name shattering on the hardwood
floor of their rejection, their name in your mouth
like glass. Names of blood and names of fire.
Names that burn when swallowed. Say it
with your last breath. With your mouth
of insatiable fury. Hungry as the sea,
their name a kind of drowning.

from Reading as a Wildflower Activist

[redcheekdays]

When the expansive-ness of the page catches on to you

up to you

overwhelms you, what is tearing? What rips apart? Do butchers always fall in love with you? Does it hurt

the membranes or the memory? What breaks through? What movement

does it take? How would you have it? How will you meet it? How will you mark it? How will you live through it?

from Notebook of Roses and Civilization

[redcheekdays]

the idea that there are
inconsolable centres
in the middle of the chest
while we keep on
coping
a notebook of roses
under the arm

from The Twits

[redcheekdays]

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

I get worried for young girls sometimes; I want them to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled.

HERE'S WHAT I'M TELLING YOU:

[redcheekdays]

Everyone's making everything up
There is no one in charge except for
those who pretend to be
No one is coming
No one is going to
Rescue you
Mind-read your needs
Know your body better than you

Always fight back
Ask for it
Say you want it
Cherish your solitude
Take trains by yourself to places
you have never been
Sleep out alone under the stars
Learn how to drive a stick shift
Go so far away that you stop being afraid of
not coming back
Say no when you don’t want to do something
Say yes if your instincts are strong
even if everyone around you disagrees
Decide whether you want to be liked or admired
Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out
what you’re doing here
Believe in kissing
Fight for tenderness
Care as much as you do
Cry as much as you want
Insist the world be theater
and love the drama
Take your time
Move as fast as you do
as long as it's your speed.

Ask yourself these questions:
Why am I whispering when I have something to say?
Why am I adding a question mark at the end
of all my sentences?
Why am I apologizing every time I express my needs?
Why am I hunching over?
Starving myself when I love food?
Pretending it doesn't mean that much to me?
Hurting myself when I mean to scream?
Why am I waiting
Whining
Pining
Fitting in?
You know the truth:
Sometimes it does hurt that much
Horses can feel love
Your mother wanted more than that
It's easier to be mean than smart
But that isn't who you are.

from Body Art as Visual Language

[redcheekdays]

In fact, if the impulse to create art is one of the defining signs of humanity, the body may well have been the first canvas.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?

from The Second Sex

[redcheekdays]

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

Go without a coat when it’s cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it’s all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you’re made of and what you’re capable of. If you’re never tested, you’ll never define your character.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

When a beautiful actress is cast in a movie, executives rack their brains to find some kind of flaw in the character she plays that will still allow her to be palatable. She can’t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would pay to see that? A female who is not one hundred per cent perfect-looking in every way? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours. So they make her a Klutz. The hundred-per-cent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way except that she constantly bonks her head on things. She trips and falls and spills soup on her affable date (Josh Lucas. Is that his name? I know it’s two first names. Josh George? Brad Mike? Fred Tom? Yes, it’s Fred Tom). The Klutz clangs into stop signs while riding her bike and knocks over giant displays of fine china in department stores. Despite being five feet nine and weighing a hundred and ten pounds, she is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society. But Fred Tom loves her anyway.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

13 Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

[redcheekdays]

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

Attention, Space Cadets: Do Not Proposition Women in the Elevator

[redcheekdays]

Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about sexual safety. It’s like having a mild case of hay fever that never goes away. It’s not debilitating. You’re not weak. You’re not afraid. You just suck it up and get on with your life. It’s nothing that’s going to stop you from making discoveries, or climbing mountains, or falling in love. Sometimes you can almost forget about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, subtly sucking your energy. You learn to avoid situations that make it worse and seek out conditions that make it better.

If a female stranger is wary around you, it is not because she suspects you are a rapist, or that all men are rapists. It’s because a general level of circumspection is what vigilance requires. Don’t take it personally.

If this frustrates you, try to remember that women are blamed for lapsed vigilance. If a woman does get raped, everyone rushes to see where she let her guard down. Was she drinking? Was she alone? Was she wearing a short skirt? Did she go to a strange man’s room for coffee at 4am?

A woman must be seen to be vigilant as well as be vigilant. If she is deemed insufficiently vigilant, she will be at least partly blamed for any sexual violence that befalls her. If she’s regarded as downright reckless, that “evidence” can be used to completely exonerate her rapist. If it comes down to a he said/she said dispute over whether sex was consensual, as so many rape cases do, the dispute becomes a referendum on whether the woman seems like the sort of reckless person who would have sex with a stranger.

If a woman does go back to a strange man’s hotel room at 4am, even if she only wants a coffee and conversation, she’s more or less given him the power to rape her. No jury is going to believe she went up there for anything but sex. So, don’t be surprised if a stranger reacts badly to that suggestion.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

You focus on the wrong stuff. It’s true, you are terrible at a lot of things, but there are a couple things that nobody else does as well as you do. It drives me bananas that you will — you will throw yourself away completely because of one or two things that you think about that you think are wrong about you. And that’s what breaks my heart.... You gotta ignore those and lean towards the things that make you like yourself. Forget everything else. Fake it. Fake your way upwards.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

i’m not a girl
i’m a storm with skin

from The Book of Disquiet

[redcheekdays]

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

Her lips drink water but her heart drinks wine.

from Lug Your Body out of the Careful Dusk

[redcheekdays]

Cities are for
breaking you into several people
at once.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

If the front door of my heart is locked and you need to get in, break a window. We can clean it up later.

Start a War

[redcheekdays]

You were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now

from Here We Are, Reflections of A God Gone Mad

[redcheekdays]

they called her witch because she knew how to heal herself.

7 Word Poem

[redcheekdays]

You’d destroy me, and I’d let you.

Daughter

[redcheekdays]

Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?

from In the Presence of Absence

[redcheekdays]

Cities are smells: Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons. Paris is the smell of fresh bread, cheese, and derivations of enchantment. Damascus is the smell of jasmine and dried fruit. Tunis is the smell of night musk and salt. Rabat is the smell of henna, incense and honey. A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that remembers another smell. A painting, nostalgic that guides you, like a worn tourist map, to the smell of the original place. A smell is a memory and a setting sun. Sunset, here, is beauty rebuking the stranger.

But to love the sunset is not, as they say, one of the attributes of exile.

Discussing Our Future Misters

[redcheekdays]

I’m willing to choose you a thousand times and I need you to choose me back.

from Carpe Jugulum

[redcheekdays]

When people were in serious trouble they went to a witch.*

* Sometimes, of course, to say, “please stop doing it."

from The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home

[redcheekdays]

Lie down and look up at the ceiling and breathe with those curiously fragile lungs of yours and remind yourself: Don’t worry. Don’t worry. All is as it was meant to be. It was meant to be lonely and terrifying and unfair and heaving. Don’t worry.

from The City’s Son

[redcheekdays]

Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use rubble of the old to raise up new ones. Some memories are bright glass, blindingly beautiful when they catch the sun, but then there are the darker days, when they reflect only the crumbling walls of their derelict neighbours. Some memories are buried under years of patient construction; their echoing halls may never again be seen or walked down, but still they are the foundations for everything that stands above them.

Glas told me once that that’s what people are, mostly: memories, the memories in their own heads, and the memories of them in other people’s. And if memories are like a city, and we are our memories, then we are like cities too. I’ve always taken comfort in that.

from Their Eyes Were Watching God

[redcheekdays]

Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

The Poet Drunk Dials

[redcheekdays]

I’m not sure how to get home,
so I’m outside your apartment.
I should tell you, I went
for the double whiskey sour.
and then a few whiskeys more.
I’m still much better at drinking
than stopping, unfortunately.

Earlier they were strippers, oiled
and beautiful, spinning like meat
on a spit. Earlier I thought of you.
How you were far away, where my hand
couldn’t wrap around the curve
of your thigh.

The sidewalks are glittering
from the rain and you are still
beautiful. This is me
throwing pebbles. If you want to,
please let me in.

I want to curl into the sweet expanse
of your back. I want to wake up,
make you coffee, make you laugh,
make myself into the person
who is worthy of you. You
have been strong so much longer
than I’ve been good.

To speak it simply now:
you are the whole of my heart.
You are the choke on my beer.
You are the last voice
before I shuffle off this mortal shitshow.

The constellations whispering to me
there will never be another one
like you. I want it written on my tombstone.
Let our love be how I’m remembered.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday 2 AM, I am gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February. My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologize for my awkward sadness. I sometimes believe that I don’t belong around people, that I belong to all the leap days that didn’t happen. The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don’t see the lightning, but you hear the echoes.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

It’s messing people up, this social pressure to “find your passion” and “know what it is you want to do”. It’s perfectly fine to just live your moments fully, and marvel as many small and large passions, many small and large purposes enter and leave your life. For many people there is no realization, no bliss to follow, no discovery of your life’s purpose. This isn’t sad, it’s just the way things are. Stop trying to find the forest and just enjoy the trees.

The Last Speakers

[redcheekdays]

Languages animate objects by giving them names, making them noticeable when we might not otherwise be aware of them. Tuvan has a word iy (pronounced like the letter e), which indicates the short side of a hill.

I had never noticed that hills had a short side. But once I learned the word, I began to study the contours of hills, trying to identify the iy. It turns out that hills are asymmetrical, never perfectly conical, and indeed one of their sides tends to be steeper and shorter than the others.

If you are riding a horse, carrying firewood, or herding goats on foot, this is a highly salient concept. You never want to mount a hill from the iy side, as it takes more energy to ascend, and an iy descent is more treacherous as well. Once you know about the iy, you see it in every hill and identify it automatically, directing your horse, sheep, or footsteps accordingly.

This is a perfect example of how language adapts to local environment, by packaging knowledge into ecologically relevant bits. Once you know that there is an iy, you don’t really have to be told to notice it or avoid it. You just do. The language has taught you useful information in a covert fashion, without explicit instruction.

from Introduction to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

[redcheekdays]

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

Cakes have gotten a bad rap. People equate virtue with turning down dessert. There is always one person at the table who holds up her hand when I serve the cake. No, really, I couldn’t she says, and then gives her flat stomach a conspiratorial little pat. Everyone who is pressing a fork into that first tender layer looks at the person who declined the plate, and they all think, That person is better than I am. That person has discipline. But that isn’t a person with discipline; that is a person who has completely lost touch with joy. A slice of cake never made anybody fat. You don’t eat the whole cake. You don’t eat a cake every day of your life. You take the cake when it is offered because the cake is delicious. You have a slice of cake and what it reminds you of is someplace that’s safe, uncomplicated, without stress. A cake is a party, a birthday, a wedding. A cake is what’s served on the happiest days of your life. This is a story of how my life was saved by cake, so, of course, if sides are to be taken, I will always take the side of cake.

THEORIES ABOUT THE UNIVERSE

[redcheekdays]

I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dog’s. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: “Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.

Sky Poem

[redcheekdays]

Stars are not small or gentle.
They are writhing and dying and burning.
They are not here to be pretty.
I am trying to learn from them.

from The Golden Lily

[redcheekdays]

Ah, those two. In a fight, they’re lethal. Around each other, they melt.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

People seem to think embracing life means to jump off cliffs and kiss strangers. Maybe it’s just slowly learning to love yourself.

[untitled]

[redcheekdays]

Ignore every instinct to flee. Remember: you are a monster too.