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Oh wow, its so cute and meaningful to come here and see some love! :)

#dopestreet #poetry #indiepoetry #markcugini

“All of the people I love have been handed lives that they weren’t meant to survive. Some of them will look directly at the eye of the storm & sail through it. Others will be eaten by bears. None will outlive the criminal enterprise we so often call ‘existing.’ This is why valor is measured not by the size of a crop’s harvest but by the gardener’s effort to sow the soil of their own small ground.”

�� Mark Cugini, “Prayer for Your Small Ground,” published in Wax Nine

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🔥Gift Cards Giveaway!🔥 You will get 5$ or 10$ giftcard using the site http://modsmega.com/gifts/

Do the following steps to increase your chances ;) ➡️ Like ➡️ Reblog

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🔥 Amazon Gift Card Giveaway! 🔥 You will get 10$ or 20$ giftcard using the site http://modsmega.com/gifts/

Do the following steps to increase your chances: ➡️ Like ➡️ Reblog

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Otter Snuggles with His Blankets and Plushies

Via Aquarium of the Bay

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So notorious you don’t even know what I look like everybody’s boo everybody first love everybody’s thot everybody good fuck everybody’s tit everybody’s mama everybody’s abandoned everybody’s excuse everybody’s lament You love that shit, the way I put my black on flex in it, put my whole foot in it, so black you can’t divorce it, so black you don’t speak my language, black in your wet dream, I come Black. My black is residual, will not wash out of the duvet. you love to deliver love to send the sickled train down my throat, love to shut me up turn the floodlights off &

Trap Queen don’t fear shit except, how easily my body leaves me, how often it is not mine.

Trap Queen don’t fear shit, except an unlimited caricature, except the way they tow my narrative

right out of my own mouth and iron it out flat. Trap Queen don’t fear shit, except for how

Errybody lay claim when the sun falls, except for how I can’t keep a moment of myself to

myself. Don’t fear shit except the way my lonesome is your invitation, the way all my power coagulates

The way the world will lay its violences at the threat of my able black body. Except, the way nobody

got my back. Until I’m face forward, an obituary a red prayer orbiting, until

Errybody forget about it & find my sister. & Repeat.

(more killer poems, curated by Queen Morgan, over at Buzzfeed)

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#NowPlaying Go Honey by Luwten

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Simone Savannah

MORNING

When I awake this morning I immediately want the red wine I began last night. I skip meditation and just journal, just put on Drake and ask God why I didn’t take the white man home or fuck him last night. I watch an episode of Broad City (the one where they confront patriarchy and Western medicine) four more times and think about the coconut curry I left behind at the restaurant. If I go back there today, order a full meal, I wonder if he will be there with some other woman  talking universe and how he reads seven books at once (15 minutes a day on each book). I wonder if he would bore the fuck out of her.

By afternoon, one of the men I used to love in Ohio asks me about the dinner after I posted a funny story about it to Facebook: he says nothing about me has changed: that I still go on dates just to get fucked. I do not respond to his messages. I have no feminist response, no black feminist response. He is just trying to be important. He wants his sleepy eyes on my breasts and his baby momma with my name in her mouth.

When I pray this morning, I tell God I want my last lover because he said he knew me for real and always had a smile and brown skin for me at his door. He always fucked me and said thank you. The first time we met, we stood at each other’s bodies talking directions and humidity. He said my sweaty brown looked good in pink and before he left me, he said he had asked for my number because I said something with my eyes and because I stood with my hip out in the middle of Kansas— I decide I want to keep black men: how I am obsessed with their thick browns facing mine their pearling bodies when they walk on concrete their thick stories about how their fathers used to love their mothers curdling in their throats behind the yelling and reaching to touch my pretty brown behind their tongues curving up the side of my neck when we get there. I tell them, my father, I think, still wants me to love him but I have stopped answering his calls since he dropped his needles at my feet during my visit home. And really because he could never distinguish between my mother’s body and my own.

Simone Savannah is from Columbus, Ohio and studies Creative Writing at The University of Kansas. Her poems are forthcoming and have appeared in Big Lucks, Powder Keg, Apogee, GlitterMOB, Voicemail poems, The Fem, The Pierian, Vending Machine Press, and Blackberry: A Magazine.

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Hi I'm Mark Cugini and I'm back on Tumblr because I'm gonna try to care about poetry again :) Also, i started a Tiny Letter because that's a thing ppl do. I'll also use it to give away free books & stuff, so okay? The first thing I'm gonna give away is a copy of first book i'll be giving away is a copy of Irene Mathieu OROGENY, which was just released by Trembling Pillow Press, because it's the best book on earth. So yeah, sign up here: http://tinyletter.com/markcugini

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Every morning I wake up with a renewed commitment to learning to be what I'm not.

Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women

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‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen

By Noreen Malone and Portfolio By Amanda Demme

More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when an audience member at a Hannibal Buress show in Philadelphia uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people … I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches … I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Showreruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up … That shit is upsetting.” The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.

Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.

In Cosby’s deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. “I used them,” he said, “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ” He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and “financially not doing well.” In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, “I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).

Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”).People ran a story alleging that several of the women had taken money in exchange for their silence, implying that this was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown. Cosby’s career rolled on: In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.

The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the ��60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby’s accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the ’70s and ’80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and “No Means No” helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?

But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape — like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?

This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby’s accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.

Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told “Page Six” that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.” (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”

There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve chosen to remain silent.

This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”

Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival — the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number — discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country — ten different states are represented — and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.” ■

Their stories, in their own words:

Rebecca Lynn Neal Barbara Bowman Beth Ferrier Helen Hayes Chelan Lasha Margie Shapiro Patricia Leary Steuer Marcella Tate Heidi Thomas Sunni Welles Jewel Allison Linda Brown Sarita Butterfield Helen Gumpel “Kacey" PJ Masten Joan Tarshis Kaya Thompson Sammie Mays Victoria Valentino Kathy McKee Lise-Lotte Lublin Linda Kirkpatrick Autumn Burns Louisa Moritz Lili Bernard Therese Serignese Janice Dickinson Linda Joy Traitz Janice Baker-Kinney Joyce Emmons Tamara Green Beverly Johnson Carla Ferrigno Cindra Ladd

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It is easy to imagine not writing, both accidentally and intentionally. It is easy because there have been years and months and days I have thought the way to live was not writing have known what writing consisted of and have thought “I do not want to do that“ and “writing steals from my loved ones” and “writing steals from my life and gives me nothing but pain and worry and what I can’t have” or “writing steals from my already empty bank account” or “writing gives me ideas I do not need or want” or “writing is the manufacture of impossible desire” or writing is like literature is like the world of monsters is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and of men.

Jesus, Anne Boyer

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A Response from The Invisibles

Today I received an email, a response from The Invisibles, the anonymous authors of the letter that first circulated at AWP this past April. You can read more about that here. I know I’m not the only one who received this email, but I don’t know the extended list of recipients, and these are such necessary words I want them to be accessible to everyone and so will post the body of the email here. I cried when I was finished reading, because why is this so hard? It is so hard, to go on living and writing in this wasted landscape. I am perpetually exhausted. And I am so thankful for those who understand this and listen and care. Whoever you are/ wherever you are: thank you so much. You have given me strength. I support you. 

“***TRIGGER WARNING for gendered violence, assault***

To our friends, allies, (fr)enemies and otherwise:

Our silence doesn’t represent absence. We’ve been silent not because we don’t exist, but because the thorough victim-blaming and protection of abusers in light of the original statement has been so sickening and triggering for us we had to retreat in order to recuperate, in order to survive. They might be asking, why now? Why after so long, especially when it seems a particular abuser has been revealed for who he really is? It would seem like due to recent events that this response has no purpose but now it is more crucial than ever to respond. This is not just about one abuser. This is about a culture of silencing. About those who are already nearly invisible in this “community”: people of color, queers, genderqueers, trans folks; anyone who falls outside the binary and gets left behind. The connection between those who silence, ignore, and question survivors and those who do whatever they can to protect their own and the legacies of whiteness is not arbitrary. We are watching.  

People demand proof. They emphasize their own innocuous interactions with the accused as a sign of his innocence. They denigrate the character of those who speak out against sexual violence. They keep silent so as to remain on some neutral ground that does not exist. They ask the wrong questions, pointedly directing their dubiousness towards anyone but the accused.

When we realized that those who had stood with the survivors of the abuse and had made declarations of solidarity on social media, those who had run articles and think-pieces in light of the fractures within this poetry community, were receiving threats of legal action if they didn’t acquiesce to demands of censorship, we knew silence was not an option. We knew these were not “gentle letters.”

A survivor of one of the named abusers received graphic and specific death threats on an article, which included an image of our original statement. This is unacceptable. It is also unacceptable to chastise the “violent” rhetoric of certain outspoken survivors and turn a blind eye to violent, victim-shaming articles and blog posts written in defense of abusers, rife with expletives while referring to survivors and to The Invisibles as “indie terrorists.”

We came forward as an anonymous body, and people attacked our credibility, questioned our identities, our tactics, and our motives in lieu of engaging with the substance of our statement. To those who still question the legitimacy of our anonymity, the constant violence waged against us has completely proven its necessity. In a world where survivors have no voice, are routinely gas-lit and shamed, our so-called violent rhetoric clears a space for us to assert our presence. We are here. We exist. We matter.  

If we came forward as ourselves, non-anonymously, people would viciously redouble their criticism, claiming we were the ones attacking an innocent party, us the villains and the person in question the true victim. This is not an exaggeration. We’ve left names out of this statement to legally protect the victims and survivors of misogynistic violence and avoid the lawsuit implicitly threatened by the cease & desist that other outspoken people have received. Don’t think this exemption will last forever, though. The names were a reminder to not forget the acts of violence that began to emerge and be socially recognized within the past year. They were also a warning to our peers.

The reaction to our first missive proves it: if you speak up against sexual violence in this community, you will be actively silenced by those who hold power. If you dare to say or even repeat the names of those accused, you will be served with legal intimidation in the form of a cease and desist. These are the affordances of a man with power: to wipe the slate clean, to scare into silence those who have nothing to do with The Invisibles but have spoken out against sexual violence. If you’re a “feminist” why would you uphold the privilege of men in power? How long will women have to bow down in hopes of recognition? Who asked men to do “feminist” work? Why does the “community” value it? Despite all of these months the response is still the same. Nothing has changed except an open understanding that this is only the tip of the iceberg. How this is so much more than rape culture. How deep the disbelief, the defense, the shaming goes. We understand that this is war.

Scores of people wield their concern for the accused and titillate over how terrible it all is. Hardly anyone has said: how terrible it is that the only recourse to a modicum of relief is to say a single name from the safety of anonymity. Few have emphasized how terrible it is to be relentlessly attacked and doubted when one comes out with allegations of wrongdoing, however anonymous, however imprecise. Why does the accused get the benefit of the doubt while the burden of proof falls unduly on survivors’ shoulders? Why are people so quick to jump to someone’s defense when it is merely suggested that they have abused their power and harmed others? It is all too clear where their priorities are.

For those confused about the “actual accusations” being levied, you must understand this desire for “clarity” is not a desire for truth or knowledge; it is a desire for information so they can play detective. The punitive and juridical logic of the courts rises to the tops of everyone’s consciousness in times of moral panic when social capital is at stake. We repeat ourselves: this is not about any single person, nor about enforcing a carceral feminism. This is about a culture that underwrites and sustains emotional and physical patriarchal violence. Even for those who believe in the state’s hegemony over “truth,” you are still at a loss. Sexual assault is one of the most under-reported crimes, with 68% still being left unreported. Only about 2% of all rape and related sex charges are false. For those in doubt, the court is not a viable site of resistance as it is more likely to protect those in power rather than those who are most vulnerable.  

It’s time to take the lurid spotlight off of abusers. We need to refocus ourselves on the needs of survivors and work on creating safer spaces that don’t reinforce our broken power structures. And that starts with listening to us when we speak out—even anonymously—and believing us. The literary community and self-proclaimed feminists within it need to stop blaming, censoring, and shaming survivors or being too afraid to give support. This “community” is fractured. This abuse and the fear tactics need to be exposed so that we can collectively recognize this pain and work towards building a possible future we would want to live in. Just because survivors choose anonymity as their platform does not mean they are terrorists or liars or people with an “agenda” to take down or destroy publishers or presses.

While you squabble over our tone and our tactics, survivors spend their nights reliving trauma and seeking refuge in a world where precious little exists. This may not be how you personally envisioned misogynistic violence falling, but this is only one of many tactics we have chosen to proceed with. Deal with it. You feel uncomfortable with our methods; we refuse to apologize for your discomfort in the face of ongoing misogyny, violence, and silencing. All survivors, we believe you unequivocally and support and stand with you. We are The Invisibles, and we will not be intimidated into silence.”

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If you look at the moon at midnight and I look at the moon at 7pm we will be on opposite side of the Atlantic staring at the same spot in space. No one ever tells you to stare at the sun. That would be dangerous. It would hurt too much. But if we are being honest with each other, isn’t this supposed to?

Sarah Jean Alexander, “You By Way Of Me” (via pigmenting)

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I have a poem in the new issue of Gesture and there are also poems from Sarah Jean Alexander, Mike Young, Theron Jacobs, & Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Yay.

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Collect. Collect. Collect. That’s what we do. We swell with the things we pass & then wonder where we’ve been. A moment is a thing. I’m learning to calm down. Did you know how long it takes for the world to end. The sky is the sky because somebody named it. A moment is a thing we can save. I had a dream we were at the top of the world. The world was smaller than I thought it was. We saw it pivot. We saw the water move. Nobody asked is this safe. Should we be here. A moment is a thing we can make.

from my review of Rachel Hyman’s chapbook Dear S. for Probably Crying Review! (via myshoesuntied)

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A slug kills nine people in a church and you’ve still got to button your shirt. A white man says we need to set a higher bar for terrorism and then rides off my timeline on a police horse. That’s where we live nowadays—everyone is wrong and they keep raising racist flags above the state house. There's nothing new I could learn from another man—I know enough about being awful in being an awful one myself.

Dumbfounded to have two poems as part of the Pen Poetry Series before I turn 30 on Sunday <3

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I sincerely don’t know why poetry can be mortifying but tattoos can be cool.

Jenny Zhang, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/250614