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WHATEVER WE NAME, WE EXCEED

Or in the naming, lose our power. I called you house and light and pushed you forth—

with each new month you show me I was wrong: here, you’ve made a house with bones of cloud. Look now, your darkness is so bright. Of course,

you’re right— I call this love. It burns to ash, and—never bird—returns to flame.

When the border fell and armies came, they cut not only arms but tongues. They opened every house and muted ears, and when the family

landed on these once again rebranded shores they found the rocks weren’t rocks, the bread not bread, the letters broken, hammer-scattered, the sky a thing that hung too low upon their heads.

Perhaps that’s how I know it, in this language their own children would refuse— dziecko, kochanek, matka, dzień—

these things I try to name each day were never mine to lose. MARY KOVALESKI BYRNES

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and i’m sitting in dark rooms lit by neon lights waiting for some angel to take me away from my body and bless me with a home. i’m here and heartbroken and tired and saying my name to empty spaces to remind myself of what it sounds like when someone says it. i am painting colors behind my eyelids, imagining scenarios in the interims, trying to fabricate my own existence because i can’t conceptualize myself enough. i’m drawing the curtains and closing the blinds and forgetting what sunlight looks like until it’s too late, until it’s blinding, until even dawn looks like dusk and dusk looks like darkness and i’m only fed off led light. i miss myself or i miss the idea of it, the faint memory of ownership, the necessity of agency that i don’t have. i’m writing eulogies and practicing speeches and standing over my own grave with a thought in mind. do you ever wonder how you’ll be remembered? ever wish you could just know? i pin myself under the covers and swallow pills to soothe the fissures and when i dream i think of death. i forget the color of my own eyes or the waistline of someone else’s body and when i walk i walk with severed limbs. i’m a stitched together monster or a cruelty of a creator or just some dying animal moaning against the breath of life. i only know where i belong in bedrooms i only see myself on my knees i choose the neon light and nothing else but the angels are gone and god is dead and no one is building me a home, so if i sing the chorus or hum the hymns and start praying or wishing or wanting then just leave me be. this is the only way i know to survive

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And here’s what makes complex PTSD uniquely miserable in the world of trauma diagnoses: it occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic event over and over and over again — hundreds, even thousands of times — over the course of years. When you are traumatised that many times, the number of conscious and subconscious triggers bloats, becomes infinite and inexplicable. If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous. If dozens of people let you down, all people become untrustworthy. The world itself becomes a threat.

Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

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The Living End (1992) dir. Gregg Araki

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to the roofers nailing shingles by silas denver melvin, published by the poetry society of new hampshire in vol 66 of touchstone

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I do not know the name of the feeling that I have for you. But it is a special tenderness, something I have never felt until now, not for anyone.

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to George Sand dated 12 November 1866; from “Selected Letters”

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Smoking is literally good for you because it makes you go for multiple walks a day and get some fresh air

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As A Replacement For Relief, Kalea Miyoshi

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Omar Sakr, Non-Essential Work

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Chelsea DesAutels, from “Hot Blood,” in A Dangerous Place

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Path of Totality, Niina Pollari

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does anyone know how to get rid of this aching hole in my chest. please say nicotine

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She didn’t know what to do

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i am going to freak out! and not in a way anyone finds endearing or relatable

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Nikolay Tolmachev: Wounded (2019)

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it's always so funny to see a bug just fucking booking it across the floor. like girl where are you going. bug plans

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why are you weird

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