makethewordsyours

[makethewordsyours]

the way the cycle of violence is playing out, small scale, in the ninth house. like.

on a bright, warm day in a strange house, a young woman commits suicide to save the girl who tortured and imprisoned her.

actually, before we talk about that.

years previous, in a cold, dark house, three people commit suicide in front of a 10-year-old girl.

hang on.

one day, a child opens a sealed tomb, in an attempt to commit apocalypse-suicide because–

no wait. that's not far enough back.

one afternoon, a little girl tries to strangle the only other child she's ever known to death.

no.

about twenty seconds beforehand, the two children mock each other because they are both motherless and unloved.

one sec, for context. so.

a little girl grows up a stranger in a house that hates her.

wait.

one night, all of your children die.

oh. uhhh.

once upon a time, a man who accidentally became god founded a world in which only those capable of using and manipulating the bodies of the dead could–

um.

a few months before the end of the world, the bodies in the mortuary of a research laboratory refused to rot.

uh. hold on. so.

on april 4, 1975, a man by the name of bill gates–

no wait. before we do that.

in 1642, a dutch explorer called abel tasman–

uh. hm.

a little more than 3,000 years before the end of the world, the first refereces to mass coal mining were recorded in china–

uh.

you know what. it's a long story. forget it.

[makethewordsyours]

it used to be 2007 you know

#i was 4 LMAO

[makethewordsyours]

77, ee cummings

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"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."

- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity

[makethewordsyours]

thinking about the paris review anne carson interview

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S. Qiouyi Lu, from "momentane"

#something something the human condition etc etc

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E. Hughes, from "My Mother at Twenty-One"

#mom im tired

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Carl Phillips, from "In Sweeter Times Have Seen You"

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Zefyr Lisowski, from "Poem Only About Girl Work"

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Franny Choi, from "What a Cyborg Wants"

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Kayleb Rae Candrilli, from “Sand & Silt", Water I Won’t Touch

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it is March by Victoria Chang

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I Could Die Today and Live Again, Summer Farah

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The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan

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The Palace of Forty Pillars, Armen Davoudian

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Adania Shibli

[makethewordsyours]

عدنية شبلي (Adania Shibli), Minor Detail, Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, New Directions, New York, NY, 2020