theseourbodiez

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[theseourbodiez]

[theseourbodiez]

[theseourbodiez]

Magdalene--The Seven Devils

"Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out" —Luke 8:2.

The first was that I was very busy.
 The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could
not happen to me, not like that.

The third — I worried.
 The fourth — envy, disguised as compassion.
 The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
 The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. 
The mosquito too — its face. And the ant — its bifurcated body.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.
 The second that I might make the wrong choice,
 because I had decided to take that plane that day,
 that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early 
and, I shouldn't have wanted that.
 The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
 the house would blow up.
 The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer
 of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth — if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I 
touched the left arm a little harder than I'd first touched the right then I 
had 
to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh — I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that
 was alive and I couldn't stand it,

I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word — cheesecloth —
 to breath through that would trap it — whatever was inside everyone else that 
entered me when I breathed in

No. That was the first one.

The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened?
 How had our lives gotten like this?

The third was that I couldn't eat food if I really saw it — distinct, separate
 from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.

The second was that the laundry was never finally done.

The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did. 
And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was
 love?

The fourth was I didn't belong to anyone. I wouldn't allow myself to belong
 to anyone.

The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn't know.

The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.

The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying—her mouth wrenched into an O so as to take in as much air…
The sound she made — the gurgling sound — so loud we had to speak louder 
to hear each other over it.

And that I couldn't stop hearing it—years later— 
grocery shopping, crossing the street —

No, not the sound — it was her body's hunger 
finally evident. —what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
 the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath —that was the first devil. It was always with me.
 And that I didn't think you — if I told you — would understand any of this —

--Marie Howe

#mariehowe #thatgoodshit

[theseourbodiez]

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day, on some day I can already remember. I will die in Paris--and I don’t step aside-- perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn. It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on wrong, and...

#rain poem that doesn't suck

[theseourbodiez]

  oh it is love

[theseourbodiez]

this is all

Aidan Ledward and Vic Van Der Well at Elite Models London photographed by Cecilie Harris for Boys by Girls “The Truth About Boys” Issue 6. Aidan wears Shirt by Soulland, Jacket by Carhartt, Shorts by Ben Sherman, Cap by Ebbet Field Flannels and Shoes by Vans. Vic wears Shirt and Jumper by YMC, Shorts by Supreme Being and Shoes by Kickers. Fashion by Josh Tuckley. Hair by Jack Kong. Make up Sylvia Makowski. 

See a preview of the series HERE 

[theseourbodiez]

"I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.

But there was a fight. I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my jacket, with the wind crying through my earring. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine."

-Denis Johnson, Work

#lovestory

[theseourbodiez]

We met our boyfriends at the poetry readings we always meant to go to and the coffee shops we walked past on our way to bars. Our boyfriends were dreamy—not in the conversational sense of the word, the way we use it like 90’s speak, but in the way that dreams really are, beautiful and five dimensional and hurting your heart with their simultaneous truth and unreality. We would always start talking about our boyfriends at the bar, then walk home drunk talking about our boyfriends, then talk about our boyfriends in our room, whispering love sick, surveying the blacked out windows/frozen yogurt lids/half used hair dye kits bleeding out all over the floor. 

Our boyfriend’s both do WBAR shows where they play the music they used to jerk off to when they were lonely in Middle School. They grew up in small towns with churches, taking black and white photographs and acting too precocious with their mothers. They drink Pimm’s Cups and own Important Records on vinyl, but they prefer the stuff you can only find on bandcamp, like live recordings of little shows in early alt-90’s Hoboken or weird trap. They both got rejected by some sort of faceless Semitic girl in the sixth grade and they haven’t really been the same since. Their clothes used to be unflattering but they’ve grown into their bodies, veins blood skin and marrow filling out CHOOSE YOUR OWN: ironic t-shirts, tight jeans, windbreakers, faded button downs, vintage finds, band merch, Adidas sliders. They have tattoos and we have to pretend these tattoos mean something, even if they’re just geometric patterns, especially if they’re in French. Carlene’s boyfriend is sometimes black but mine has to be Jewish. When they were little boys they were asthmatic, so they had to take their inhalers with them everywhere. Sometimes at sleepovers they would lie like sarcophagi in North Face sleeping bags, listening to the rasp of their breath, listening to the kid next to them playing with his dick, listening to the fear in their own hearts, listening to the darkness, too afraid to get up and turn bodies over looking for the backpack with the medicine in its stomach, wondering what it felt like to die.

Of course the rules are always changing. Sometimes our boyfriends are straight edge, because their dads were alcoholics who hit their mothers so they haven’t even tasted bourbon—they have tattoos that tell the world they’ve never touched the stuff. In that case, we meet them in Anthro lecture, where we’re wearing black skater skirts that show off our soccer camp calves and doing all sorts of early Britney inspired braid and pigtail combinations.

Our boyfriends make us feel like pre-menstrual Barbie’s. When we’re with them we feel pretty and cherished, not like oozy open wounds or the bruised brown bits of bananas or the types of girls who say they hate their daddies when what they really mean is that they hate themselves. When they take our parts apart and stack them together at just the right angle, we realize that we really do love cock penetration. The dark hair on their ribs is definitely not disgusting to us; neither is the taste of their semen or the face that they make when it is coming out of them, a face that says: Fuck Yea. You Love To Fuck Me. I Invented Semen. The most important thing about fucking our boyfriends is how happy it makes our boyfriends—happier than finding a vintage off-teal Lacoste windbreaker or a rare bike part on EBay. We know that as long as they are Our Boyfriends we will be Their Girlfriends, the type of girl whose brain and parts are all stacked in the right way, still and plastic and one on top of the other. 

Our boyfriends liked to take us to parties to play beer pong against other couples. Single girls would put Bikini Kill on the speakers and we would just sway politely, because we were with our boyfriends. Sometimes at night, when we were walking our boyfriends home from the parties because they had gotten too drunk, they would tell us about how lonely the suburbs can get when you’re high, how the trees look too thin and every car running past you has a person inside a bubble of light, and none of the people can talk to one another or reach out and touch another human heart, and all you want to do is find someone you love and be with them but you imagine that being with someone is the hardest thing in the world to do, especially if you love them, because you haven’t even met the person you love but already not sitting next to them is almost too much to bear.

[theseourbodiez]

[theseourbodiez]

"We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

[theseourbodiez]

Every thing is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know. I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I tum hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger. She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.

David Foster Wallace, Everything Is Green

[theseourbodiez]

Richard Siken, Crush