#freya bantiff

[blurred-antics]

a collection regarding the overlap of love, hunger, and death

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado // If Someone Told Me on a Date That They Liked The Idea of Human Composting by Freya Bantiff // Momentum by Ashley Blanton // The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich // cover art from Ni Un Leve Trazo by David Pulido Suárez // quote from Edvard Munch // Dead Stars by Ada Limón // Transcendence by Micah Ulrich // The Horror and the Wild by The Amazing Devils // Where It Begins by Erica Jong

[calvinandhobbes]

someone make ishmael real i need to read him a poem (“god the whale” by freya bantiff)

[liberationtheology]

Sometimes I imagine the sun striking midday will drop in a hand’s motion and smite me. Confess your crime: mine is to love like the craftsman’s apprentice who never dirties her hands in acting. My dad’s is arguing. In the debate about the divine watchmaker, he lists mutating viruses, parasitic worms, the test runs of extinction and I say if God exists, I think they might be a whale. Unfathomed and wildering. No cogs and quick fingers. Just this warm-blooded, blubbered God on a migration path I can’t follow. Perhaps this is because if God sung a song, I am certain it would cover

vast distances. It would be peaceful as weeping and if whales could cry, God would. They say God saw the world and it was good but this is omniscience tangled in ghost gear, surfacing through oil slicks, starving for sustenance in a sea brought to simmer. We barrel into God at 25 knots and God swallows it – our loneliness and toothbrushes, bitterness and broken sandals, so when we send up plankton bloom prayers God has no room to stomach them, becomes deaf to all but military sonar, seismic surveys and this: the waterlogged clock, the leaking battery, the alarm ringing in God’s gut.

—Freya Bantiff, 'God the Whale'