#Angie Sijun Lou

[havingapoemwithyou]

Jessica gives me a chill pill ​by Angie Sijun Lou

[typewriter-worries]

Jessica gives me a chill pill, Angie Sijun Lou

[weltonboys]

jessica gives me a chill pill - angie sijun lou

[texaschainsawmascara]

Age of Delilah - Ethel Cain / Jessica gives me a chill pill - Angie Sijun Lou x

[random-poetry-account]

[romanticise-a-quiet-life]

‘I’m coming out as someone who loves things unevenly, my theologies strewn out in the dark’

Jessica gives me a chill pill, Angie Sijun Lou

[plsdnttmata]

Jessica gives me a chill pill by Angie Sijun Lou

NOT EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE SOMETHING ELSE

[bthayerr]

"Drown"

Once, when I was very young, I asked Baba what he did when there was no school during the revolution. Baba laughed and said he mostly just fucked around. He had just failed his entrance exam to university and every sober night he was buried in the same dream. In this dream he comes to class late, his breath reeking of whiskey, and opens the door to an empty room. In this dream he runs down a long hallway, and the sky is a horizon of smoke.

Instead of telling Nainai about his test score, Baba put his textbooks in his backpack each morning and went to the abandoned lot to race cockroaches and eat watermelons soaked in beer. He sliced them into fat cubes and let the juice drip down his double chin. When he came home at dusk he said, xingku le, school was so hard today. There were still watermelon seeds stuck in his teeth when the men took him away to the camps. They put a bag over his head and laid him down in the bed of a truck all night, weaving between dunes, the morning dripping light like a sieve.

At the camps the air was dry and chapped his lips. They shaved his hair off so when he looked in the mirror he saw a shiny egg staring back at him. So shiny he could almost see himself in it. When the dry season came he put his bald head on the earth and prayed for monsoons. They took away his keychain of Guanyin and wiped down his knees, scabbed over with prayer, and handed him a shovel instead. Dig, they said, so Baba moved piles of sand around, in a tropical daze, until it felt like he had dug up the desert and put it back.

I thought of the suburbs in Cincinnati where we had our first house, how Baba dug up the sand in the backyard to put in a swimming pool. The sun flared over our no- bedroom apartment while Baba filled the pool with cold water, laughing as it overflowed when he sunk his beer belly into it. He watched television by squinting at it through the open window. The television spoke to him about money and girls while he smoked cigarette after cigarette, each one lit with the end of another, ashing into his bright blue oblivion.

When I was very young, I asked Baba what drowning felt like, and he said not everything feels like something else.

 ❦❦❦   — Angie Sijun Lou

[remuslupinfarts]

Thinking about this again

[rosie-kairi]

I wonder how lonely a death like that must've been?

[havingapoemwithyou]

Lots of Space, Nothing Holy by Angie Sijun Lou

[timehascomeagain]

Some of my favourite endings to poems :) ❤

[discoidal]

if you could carve/tattoo a poem into ur skin what would it be? mine would be birds hover the trampled field by richard siken, from war of the foxes 🥰

[mossyshadows]

Jessica gives me a chill pill

​by Angie Sijun Lou

I keep waking up in different

beds and in this same

body. I have to say this

right away so you know

it didn't start with limbs

slackened, hair

oily, a cruelty towards

the sun. It started

in the backseat of Jessica's

Pepto-dismal truck. She

tied my hair back with

rubber bands when

the freeway passed clean

through us. Jessica says

I can feel like a cherry

blossom tree wobbling

under lightning. Jessica

has a forehead scar from

the deep end of a pool. I

ask Jessica what drowning

feels like and she says

not everything feels like

something else. That night

we lose the 7/11 lottery

but I draw my lucky

number, no quarters

so we scratch our tickets

with fingernails. Jessica says

that's the sanctity of ritual—

a ceaselessness in how

I look at every drop

of rain before it touches

ground, the way Jessica

mouths my name in her

sleep eating each syllable like

a minor god. I'm coming out

as someone who loves

things unevenly, my theologies

strewn out in the dark,

this iPhone an almost oracle.

Jessica forces me to watch

every sunset even when I

am full. She puts her fingers

in my mouth and says open

your eyes. Open them.

You see the small-town girls

on big billboards? One day

that's us.

[emelting]

maybe its just because im in a pensive little mood right now, but i’ll try to confine it all into a little white txtpost on a little social media website. but when i put words and ideas in a search bar with the thought of what im going to get back in results, im just taken by a strange... emotion, when i dont get what i expected.

‘omg theyre so online they just discovered surprise’ no, its not surprise. its like... its not relief either -- but there’s something to be said about how people are constantly worried that AI is going to take over their jobs because of recent jumps like chatgpt existing and how whenever i type things into the search and dont get what i want back im like ... yeah, maybe computers and the human mindreading capabilities of AI are a long ways off -- its like love and joy.

its love and joy that i came looking for, say, sand, and got waves and oceans and ships and even cats back. like, hello, cats? how is that in any way related to what i searched?

and i still end up reading the little textposts in the results i get back bc i love how the computer thought that was somehow related and how humanity is so tightly strung together in our minds and our feelings and words that everything crosses over into everything. 

[demons-incorrect-alw]

Baby Griz: They asked me what dying feels like. The only answer I had was "not everything feels like something else.”