Mushrooms on a short hike in North Carolina
Crimson flash of pain
rusty orange dried blood
golden sun on sidewalk,
edged by mossy mud.
Clear blue rolling tears;
I crumple to my knees.
Indigo grows twilight
and violet my grief.
Santa Muerte, Our Lady of Holy Death
A special shoutout to LGBTQ+ Mormons and exmos this pride; to you in the closet, sitting awkwardly in sacrament meeting, finding excuses to duck out of homophobic Sunday school lessons, you, wearing a rainbow pin to girl's camp, you out and proud and still attending, enduring side eye from sisters and comments to "maybe tone it down" from your bishop. You, afraid to bring your partner home, you who's only Mormon on Sundays but can't bear to let your parents down (earthly and heavenly). To you who took the bravest step and left the church and your community, and feel like you'll never find a new one. To you who hears "no way you were a mormon!" but are still unravelling the trauma of purity culture.
I see you.
I love you.
It gets better.
We are a very very dumb, stupid people
Ambivalent, Brine, Crone, Delinquent, Ever, Fervent, Gallant, Hollow, Iridescent, Jagged, Kalimba, Loom, Mosaic, Null, Opal, Petrichor, Quasi, Rescind, Solve, Timber, Undulate, Verdant, Wind, Xylitol, Yearn, Zonal
I never before felt this ache in my chest
when the lover on screen was found broken and dead.
But now
it's you. And it's me
in the story.
And when looking for death, there's no need to hurry.
My heart blocks my throat
I don't know what to do
Now the survivor is me
and the dead one is you.
"One might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity."
- Stephen King, The Gunslinger
so. bad news. we have to keep going tomorrow. good news is that I’ll keep going with you
Care in their caress
through pain pricked fingers.
Love in the weaving
of comings and goings
Pas de deux He was a mortician. She was a seamstress. They wove stories of coming and going. All the unanswered, the unclaimed, the unknown became secondary. There was a lot of rain across a parched earth and they only saw relief of the end of a dance. But one dance leads on to another and another. The joy is in the twists, the dips always righted.