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the code only permits unicellular organisms: dinoflagellates, ciliophora, euglena, angelus1.
❥ title borrowed from track 16 of Liv.e's 2023 album Girl in the Half Pearl, linked below.
oh, how i remember you,
made of grain, gloved spine, skeleton.
back when our conscience
was but a facsimile of plastic,
a nucleus of tenuous string,
i would sit at your
legs for hours and think
of anyone you told me
to.
&
i think of your notches, your sympathies
knocked loose, still so fondly.
"i recognized a swallowtail
by the wing patterns you
used to talk about."
"all this time,
and i'm still happy you
got the job."
"if you keep dodging left
and hitting at the openings,
you'll eventually get it."
how easy and foreign it was
to want
your soft mutation,
your bleached blue flight,
the stunning squares crackling out of you
like poorly sutured sunlight.
how you'd beckon,
split your lag into a smile and with every frame
make us hope for returnreturnreturnreturn,
more return each time.
&
i want to melt into that space
eat myself into that else-
where,
still so much
still so often.
so then,
you apparatus of flesh,
you frigid, shock-shell membrane,
this is how i live my days:
i fold my cuticles onto themselves,
sleep on an achebed.
i fall in love with strangers' voices,
shoo ghosts away from my bruises.
i cook meals more pleasant than my stomach.
and then i'll see it,
on the edge of the lawn.
the noon-bitten flies,
the persistent desire.
that something will sit here,
return,
eat from my hand and ask,
"did you ever get it?"
1. angelus
2. Girl in The Half Pearl
---
this was originally meant to be a sweeter piece, but i actually have been feeling a lot of dread about being on the internet. i had no need of the awareness that there is such an abundance of callous people in the world, so entitled to dictating and regurgitating arbitrary rules about the life you must live, so enraptured by outrage, so indifferent to other people’s realities. truly the cruel angel’s thesis. that said, the sources that inspired this poem still move me and are hopefully reflective of the relationships i have tried to nurture online. i do hope we think of each other more fondly than all this. i hope we do enough to deserve it.
as one of the few responsibilities we have within both the virtual and real worlds we inhabit daily, it would mean a lot to me if you could share and donate to the following causes:
- Palestinian Child Relief Fund
- Doctors Without Borders
- Friends of the Congo
- COJEHA
the following spreadsheet contains plenty of fundraisers and organizations focused on providing aid to multiple global causes:
- Fundraisers