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Here's What Our Parents Never Taught Us

by Shinji Moon

You will stay up on your rooftop until sunlight peels away the husk of the moon, chainsmoking cigarettes and reading Baudelaire, and you will learn that you only ever want to fall in love with someone who will stay up to watch the sun rise with you. You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you will realize that nowhere seems like home anymore. A woman will kiss you and you’ll think her lips are two petals rubbing against your mouth. You will not tell anyone that you liked it. It’s okay. It is beautiful to love humans in a world where love is a metaphor for lust. You can leave if you want, with only your skin as a carry-on. All you need is a twenty in your pocket and a bus ticket. All you need is someone on the other end of the map, thinking about the supple curves of your body, to guide you to a home that stretches out for miles and miles on end. You will lie to everyone you love. They will love you anyways. One day you’ll wake up and realize that you are too big for your own skin. Molt. Don’t be afraid. Your body is a house where the shutters blow in and out against the windowpane. You are a hurricane-prone area. The glass will break through often. But it’s okay. I promise. Remember, a stranger once told you that the breeze here is something worth writing poems about.

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“Now that I’ve survived when does living begin?”

— — Derrick Austin, from “My Education,” Tenderness (via lifeinpoetry)

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Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

Feeding the Worms by Danusha Laméris

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“It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies (tr. by Stuart Gilbert & Lionel Abel), 1943

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Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals

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Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

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Sue Zhao

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arabic poetry is so beautifully yet painfully romantic, i mean “they asked “do you love her to death?” i said “speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life" and “because my love for you is higher than words, i've decided to fall silent" and "it is not enough to say love in Arabic, you must say 'be the thing that buries me'" could have got jane austen crying and shaking

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Ed Simon, from Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story

[Text ID: "loss, betrayal, and trauma is something that must be exorcized from the psyche before healing can take place." Just because we might believe ourselves to be done with ghosts doesn't mean that ghosts are done with us. Phantoms so often function as the allegorical because whether or not specters are real, haunting very much is. We're haunted by the past, we're haunted by trauma, we’re haunted by history.]

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“James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78”, An Interview by Jordan Elgrably

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matija medved nytopinion art

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Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

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I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

This is how you lose the time war, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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Fave short stories from April 🌿

You know the drill, here are my favourite short stories published online i read last month :-)

Seams - Olga Tokarczuk tr. Jennifer Croft

The Path of Water - Emma Törzs

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reporter - Daniela Tomova

April 2045: The Hole - Taras Antypovych tr. Uilleam Blacker

The Great Awake - Julia Armfield

Mika Model - Paolo Bacigalupi

substack version if you would like a little more detail before you read! like comment subscribe xoxo but more importantly come discuss your thoughts interpretations theories etc with me <3

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Hanif Abdurraqib, In an Interview with Krista Tippett

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— Ocean Vuong, Nothing

[text ID: I used to cry in a genre no one read.]