courtneydove

[courtneydove]

yall my friend has had a really rough year (multiple ER visits, long covid, major surgery) and now their cat is sick, please share and d0nat3 if u can!!

[courtneydove]

[courtneydove]

what she says: i’m fine

what she means: the tv show iCarly always portrayed Spencer as some bumbling idiot after dropping out of law school after three days, but they disregard the fact that this means Spencer did in fact finish college with a degree and knew enough about the law to pass his entrance exams and had good enough grades in his classes to be accepted into a law school therefore the image that they portrayed of him being stupid is false, he was simply a man who realized his passion lied elsewhere and he wasn’t going to pay a tuition for a law school studying that when his heart wasn’t in it. he was a smart man with the knowledge and capability to do anything, and he chose his art

[courtneydove]

“I know what I bring to the table, so trust me I’m not scared to eat alone”

— (via bootyscientist)

[courtneydove]

Holly Jo Glynn was a 21-yo girl who committed suicide in 1987 by jumping from a cliff in Dana Point, California. She was unidentified until 2015, when her old school friends and interested redditors teamed up to help identify her.

 Her family had tried to involuntarily institutionalize her 8 months before she killed herself, but to no avail. She was described as quiet and shy, but she liked to party, flirt and use drugs.

 Holly’s life unraveled in September of 1987, when she took a taxi at 3 am to the 150 ft remote cliffs to jump to her death. She’d asked the taxi to take her as far as her last $18 would get her, then walked alone the rest of the way. The driver  had described her as seeming silent and unhappy during the ride.

 At the scene, police found a half consumed can of Coca-Cola (her last drink), a purse (stolen) containing small change, a packet of cigarettes, matches, and two maps. She had mid length strawberry-blonde hair, and wore a tan dress, men’s underwear and turquoise-colored canvas shoes, all of which were believed to have been second-hand clothing.

 The LA times described how “standing at the ledge, she would have seen nothing–there was no moon that night–and heard only the wet smack of the Pacific against the rocks below.“

 Investigators found marks on the side of the cliff that she had struck during her fall, and she was missing several teeth postmortem due to the impact. A detective described how “she was still alive for some time at the bottom of the cliff, because she had made angel wings with her arms in the sand, you know, like children do in the snow." 

 Police were unable to identify her since her family had never reported her missing, and the case went cold. Holly was cremated and her ashes were scattered in the ocean. She was then forgotten until her 2015 identification.

 One can only imagine what went through her head on the cold dark night of ‘87 in which she flung herself onto the jagged beach side rocks after drinking half a can of cola. It seems the loneliest death possible.

[courtneydove]

[courtneydove]

u don’t have to venmo me just follow me on letterboxd

[courtneydove]

me every time i remember im a virgin: i felt so symbolic yesterday

[courtneydove]

i want to bite her shoulder as she reads in bed, wrap my arms around her when she’s cooking because god knows i would burn the house down if i tried.

i want to write songs about her lips and hear her sing them in the shower as i brush my teeth.

we won’t be able to afford heating in our apartment, so i rub her hands and she blows hot air onto my face to make me laugh. it doesn’t work that well, so we get a dog and a couple cats to sleep with us on the mattress on the floor.

when we fight, we don’t grit our teeth. i might yell, but she knows why. she holds me accountable for my past and forgives it at the same time.

we try to have hate sex because i thought it sounded fun, but there’s no hate in between us. she doesn’t kiss me to make me shut up when i’m angry.

but she lets me breathe and reminds me that i am not my parents, and when i look into her eyes she kisses me soft and slow, and we go and watch sitcoms on the couch.

now i know what tracy chapman was talking about.

[courtneydove]

she said “i get mean when i’m nervous, like a bad dog”

a bit of my sunburnt skin peels off and i feed it to her

it sits on her tongue like a psychedelic

but i never did the tough stuff, so what do i know

she giggles as she tells me about the first time she did ecstasy in her pajamas at her friend’s mcmansion

maybe i would’ve done molly if i had a friend like molly to do it with

i’m not a teenager anymore and i can’t go back

and tell myself to wait for something better to come along, to study more than i drank

so i’m living backwards, born inside out

watching this girl with bangs and hoop earrings

wondering what i could’ve been if i was somebody else

“people call themselves by names their parents made up for them but they won’t believe in god”

[courtneydove]

i am the holy garden and my knowledge is uneaten. the ugly fruit sits in my mouth. there isn’t just one god. there’s all the men who made me eve, lilith, mary magdalene, or just mary. the traitor, the monster, the whore, the virgin. all i wanted was to name the creatures living inside of me. i learned shame from men. he blamed it on me. so now i am cursed to bleed every month until he takes root inside of me. rosemary’s baby blooms from within me through the original sin of painful childbirth. it’s anything but original. i will repeat this process until i can come back to the garden. i thought i liked being banished because it was a man who made me, who made eden. but i never saw god’s face. i never saw her breastfeeding the mammals, the birdbath of wine in the apex of her leftover umbilical piano chord. no one knows the face of god. the garden belongs to woman. he can stay only if he loves me.

[courtneydove]

it had that bubblegum hotel smell, that cheap chicago carpeting that soaks up all the chlorine footprints as you run barefoot to the elevator with the mirrors and the painting of the sky on the ceiling. they didn’t have my name on any of the key chains in the gift shop, only bite-sized versions of me, cut in half and lined up next to Megan, Kaitlyn, Bethany, Hannah, Sarah. but the pool said my name in its lonely night lights for the businessmen/adulterers to swim in as the cardiologist told them to. I can’t remember if I was embarrassed or not when I ran down the halls in just my bathing suit. it was just me and my brothers and sisters and our shallow breaths from lungs trained for the sea but only deserving the lake, pumping sea salt blood to hearts the size of our dad’s fist. they shivered in our chests, but never breached our redyellowbrown skin. our feet pounded against that bubblegum carpet and no, dad didn’t hit us for another few years. it was only a couple times and it wasn’t as bad as you’re picturing. that’s not the point. the point is that I can’t remember if I liked being stared at when I ran around in my bathing suit, but I can remember the smell of the hotel.

[courtneydove]

the only time i’ve ever been on a plane was when i was eight years old. i had just had my first communion. i ate bread and drank wine for the first time but really i had taken the crackers they gave at a different church a year before, because i was too afraid to tell them that i had never done it before. so my mom took me and my sisters on a plane to new york, where we stayed in a fancy hotel and celebrated with wine and bread. when i think about going on a flight by myself i expect that they’ll lose my luggage. by the time i had taken communion a thousand times, we could no longer afford wine and bread. even if i could afford a plane ticket, they would have lost me, because i am damaged goods. i have tasted wine and bread and i have flown through the air. just once. i am not eight years old anymore. i was never blonde like my mom. i don’t know what it’s like to worry about pimples and prom and periods. so i never learned how to be normal. what i’m saying is: i can’t trust you. i can’t trust anyone. once a whore, you know? i talk about god but i don’t even know what i mean, i don’t belong in a church like the virgin i was named after. i bet mary never got turned down from porn directors who didn’t like her hair. maybe that’s blasphemous. i think she covered her hair anyway. but i think that’s what i mean. i never learned not to blaspheme. i never learned how to cover my hair. so i read about professor bhaer and mr. rochester and fantasize about getting fucked in their haunted houses with dead girls playing the piano through the yellow wallpaper. i don’t know what love is. so i make it up for myself.

to all the girls whose lips couldn’t move fast enough.

[courtneydove]

his cum was tree sap. dripping down the slope of my stomach to meet the blood he had drawn between my legs, where life threatened to bloom from his seed inside of me. his cum was glue. keeping my surgical scars sutured together, sticking to me and saving the slices that doctors did not approve, that doctors gave me medication for when i told them what i did with the razor blade. his cum was paint. i was colored with his whiteness, made a redbone by my own blood on his sheets. once, a year before, when his friend took a picture of me because of how stoned i looked, prostrate on the floor like mary magdalene, my face was painted with traces of mascara and vomit. it was the summer, so my face was colored. his cum was on my stomach. that’s how i described it to my diary. i was so proud to swallow him, to wear him, to become his. but i was manic and i didn’t know any better. i am telling you this so you understand why i can’t see you this christmas. you are not like him, but if we have sex, you will become just like him. i will cry and hurt but it will not be your fault. if you don’t want to have sex with me, i will look like a fool, but at least i will be me.

primordial ooze.

[courtneydove]

mom’s dad worked on a crane and the boys would tell each other stories about the ones who fell from a beam, all dying except one: the hammer on his belt broke his fall. it’s an urban legend. mom laughed and took us to gymnastics lessons in troy so that we’d never fall off the balance beam in the first place. my daughter will be my little duck, i tell her, it’s okay to fly away when it gets cold. let it roll off your feathers, babe. maybe i’ll have a homebirth and your placenta will remain intact and we’ll have scrambled eggs. it’ll be funny in the moment, even if your friends don’t get it. you don’t have to walk on eggshells around me. the cat sleeping in the gutter of our purple house on our hot tin roof will catch a mouse for you, and you might cry, because it’s hard to understand mothers and what they feed you. not because you’re naive, but because she forgets that your little body can’t fit all the love she has for you. so you overflow. but we will teach the cat to chase the dust in the sunlight. she will sit on the bookshelf and teach you how to pray to the cow called hathor, who gave birth to the sun who was a king. but the king sits inside the goddess of the sky. you’ll laugh when i tell you her name. like a peanut. the smallest, sweetest thing, but loved by elephants not so small. but cattle guns exist. beware. your aunt was born on the same day as a man who said, “there is nothing more poetic than a woman’s corpse.” but i tell you, darling, there is nothing more poetic than a woman’s life.

to my daughter: on cranes, cats, and cattle

[courtneydove]

'My father once broke a man's hand...' while standing on a dirty curb outside a bar. That’s what he tells us. Your dad’s hands say something different each time you look, changing in your eyes like you’re the funhouse mirror and he’s the drunk kid paying too much to impress his girlfriend. It will start with teddy bears and elephant ears. When his hands are gnarled with fungus it’ll be child support. When his hands are ashy and cracked, it’ll be mittens for the kids. His hands will never break, even though he won’t let me give him a manicure. Are my cuticles skin or hair? They’re a part of my nails, but next to my skin. I held my dad’s hand and asked, “Did you know that horse’s hooves and elephants’ tusks and bull’s horns are made out of the same thing hair and nails are made out of? I thought they were teeth.” He eclipses my hands with his and says, “Teeth? Who has teeth on their hands?” And I said, “The Devil?” And he laughed and laughed but never let go of my hands. I thought of hair and teeth and nails in teratomas. I thought maybe my nails would grow like tusks through my father’s hands.

[courtneydove]

my dad covered my eyes when the girl got bit by a german shepherd in the movie, (but it was the dog that licked my wounds for me). was he hiding me from the girl who got bit? or from the dog? are they the same? they say a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a man’s, and i believe it. i wanted you to kiss my papercuts, too, but you were drinking lemonade. the girl in the movie had blue eyes, but they looked black. they looked back. there was milk in her hair and sand in his mouth. milk from cattle without a calf, sand from glass without stains. i speak of you in dreams. i do not know why the dog tried to eat sandy seashells (maybe to hear the ocean in his guts). i do not know why i am on the beach. i do not know why you chase me into the forest. i do not know why i am in your mouth. but it’s just a dream, anyway.

BE THE LION.