clawing my way out of the womb

consumption harkens back to life in the womb
when everything was provided. we must assert that
we are capable of existing in the world by doing things.
there is no parent who's going to take care of me anymore.

- from that wonderful place filled with iconic quotes aka. tumblr

Absolutely beautiful graphics and theme so far!!!

@EllieMae thank you!!! <3

(SO SOOOOO good to see you around here E!) have a wondderful napo - looking forward to reading your poetry!

(@alliyah it is ever so good to see you again too :'))) 🩷 though your thread is suspiciously absent.... >.> that's a little shady)

the present is organic matter, the future holds roses

here, the brimming trash won't take itself out
where the nest of wasps at the door are armed to sting
where every step i take past the threshold
leaves a trail of blood in its wake

here, the heart is a souvenir from childhood,
the kind that is locked in the basement
i am just another check on my father's list,
a swelling bruise on my mother's hips

but there, i hunt for compost gardens
where the dragonflies keep away the wasps
where the meadow sages sway like women,
like witches, like the ragged wives of farmers
gathered around a warm fire in winter
where sparrows flock to my feet
for a pot of water and a shower of seeds

and there, my heart is spun with sugared gossamer,
holy and delicate, a container for the love,
the love that is my life's work, that has held
taut and ripped apart and renewed our home
that has fermented the rooms and filled up the manure
like the mirth of families with filled bellies

if the here is like the kitchen waste,
foul with wet and dark with want,
then there is the reward for the patient soil
that welcomes the rot with open arms

Spoiler

@alliyah @candyhearts <3 <3 <3 much love to both of you ! :') really struggling through the month, so these messages are very much what I needed to see when I logged in! <3

i am aching joints and reopened wounds. i flinch when i'm hit, and scream ugly when i'm mad. i leave friends on read for months, i forget to say thank you and welcome. i pour my tea into a wide mug, and spill it all over the counter every single time. i tip toe around kitchens and living rooms in fear of my own kin.

but when i sit down with a song, i snuggle against it like it's an oversized comforter, fresh flannel washed with citrusy detergents, on a chilly January evening. i pick up on the cadence of my favorite singer's voice in a language i don't know. i cry at the drop of a hat, like my blood is a storehouse for the grief of all my ancestors, but i can't cry on command. i dream of baking cookies, apple pies, cupcakes for my nephew, for my sweet teeth. i call my diary "sky", read obscure poets, show up fashionably late, and crack bad jokes with a shit faced grin.

i have neither the perfect curves, nor the sharp corners. I am underbaked, filled with air bubbles, and falling miserably short. but god, i cannot shut myself down and walk into someone else's skin, though i have tried countless times. every time i fortify myself, life finds me over and over again. it sends me a hundred missed calls, bangs against the doorframe, and tugs at my sleeve insistently, like a kid at a candy store. Or a child with a fear of abandonment. Or maybe, a jilted lover. it slaps me over the face. it tells me:

i am life, you are my home, so just let me in.

plain text:

Spoiler

the beauty of having a bird's nest of hair:
it is bountiful

it is a home for fairies who hide and plot under mussed up curls,
their wings secreting secrets of nutritive honeyjuices to
a scalp buried under boughs of frzz, one that never finds the Sun

it is a museum of textures,
thick, frothy, entangled, and clung to itself
it refuses to be cut off, to conform,
to straighten, or tighten into ringlets
it simply is. ceaseless, and well-lived

after years of the shame, the alien-haired misery,
of raking, clumping, heating, masking,
of hiding it under infallible buns and ponytails,
of brushing bird's nests into a silken spool,
a smoothness that can't see or hear or feel
a superficiality that is reassuring
to other thinned silkheads,
after all of it,

i miss the untamed shocks, the
meandering strands, it was a hair that
never hurried to be anything,
a hair that sang to the Earth
and whispered of the lost wilderness

i miss the parts of me that fell with the trees

what could you possibly kill that you love so much,
it would make the Sun rise again?

1. she walked into my life with a boxset of smiles and colours. oh, the colours. we were folded deep in the forest, backs flat on cold grass, when she gave me the bluest sky i had ever known. all the while, she watched me with eyes lit up like buttons of fire, burning all over me.

apart from the colours, she gathered songs and hopes and warmth in her arms. she played the Sun like a violin, and the light waltzed into our home and sang to us. It sang to my treacherous heart, the one that snagged at my chest every time we touched.

2. occasionally, there were power-wrestles and the odd shouting match. but no wars, never wars. that night, when she stood blazing in the middle of our living room, my eyes hungered for the distance between us, to thread my fingers through her hair and clothe her with kisses. With love.

3. she didn't know what to do with it, all that love.
the clouds ran away from our yard.
someone blew out the sun.
i was cocking a toy gun when
she began firing all those words-

4. oh, the words. she pulled them through a needle,
mapped out the hurt, made rough sketches
of all the ways i could fall apart for her. she handed me
bloody words from a velvet tongue. and i just took it,
like my mother, and like her mother,
like a Sun that tumbles into a bottomless sky
the clouds knew, long before i did, how to leave.

5. and i did leave.
i ripped out the stitches of
her wooden hands on my shoulders,
but i always feel her gaze
seared into my back. the music wailed,
the Sun shone when she walked out.
she found me in the trees, in the dark:
i loved you too much to resist
hurting you, how does one kill something
they don't love?

[title borrowed from Succession, the power of a single quote to coax poetry out of the darkest parts of you]

a womb as the gravity of a home

a womb is a grave or a cradle.
in my mother, it is both.

she, the woman of big beds in a small life,
wife to a mild husband, axeman to her own dreams,
her clothes stretching out at the seams, like

her burdens,
she wrings them out to dry,
folds them into tight squares
to store in her soft bones
they simmered beneath her like

her anger, her fire,
burning the four wild daughters who think to each other
that they will never become their mother,
that they, armed with fresh blood,
are oysters hinged around a Schrödinger's pearl,
are divine letters addressed to an endless sky.

but the Sky, the divine and the earthly alike,
need tethers and anchors and gravity,
and who else bears proudly the weight of family,
of body sweat and the spicy scent of kitchens,
of recognising the faces of your children in your demons
and kissing them good morning anyway.
no one but my mother. mother,

whisper one last, sweet lie to me
that we don't need you, that we are tired of you,
make it easy for us when you leave, when all that's left of you
is a grave that cradles you to sleep
and a womb sprouting inside me