when I imagine myself

                 I am always leaving

I couldn’t draw my own face if god asked

— Andrés Cerpa, from “The Vault,” published in The Offing

from “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects” by Danez Smith, Poetry Magazine March 2018

from weheartit

Great Stour River, Kent

In the Mood for Love (2000), dir. Wong Kar-wai

where is the lie

“And I tell the truth as an expedient thing, for the reader and myself. I don’t obscure the truth with the mundane. I don’t build my work on the aesthetic I learned in the MFA classes at school, on suggestions that I slow down, that I remove the poetry and ambiguity from my prose, that I produce competent writing. Long before I graduated with my first degree, I was tired of competent writing. Competent books, with protagonists with names like Siobhán, who live in brownstone apartments and are never gratuitous or explicit or poor. I can’t afford to let white academia drag me into mediocrity.

But it’s hard to articulate how one goes from a server to a camgirl to a master’s student to someone holding a degree in her hands so tightly the paper became wet and she had to throw it away. Because I’ve existed in extremes for much of my life, I’m reticent to write from a middle place, where there is no urgency. I can hear my graduate program’s workshop facilitator, a white man, saying, “Terese, slow down.” He wants the tourist experience. He wants me to curate pain and titillation, and tell what each room looks like, because, without that, my work is not enough. He doesn’t believe that these experiences felt this fast, but they did. He wants to see the struggle, but he doesn’t deserve it.”

here

Wall murals by Agostino Iacurci

I was born under a bad moon. My grief is that I have one grief which outweighs all the joy there is.

Miguel Hernández, from Selected Poems; “I Have Lots of Heart,” (via funeral)

The Namibian desert with the morning fog… magical

EB Ascendant Marquise Ring

Marina Abramovic, The Kitchen (Homage to Saint Therese), 2009

The Shape of Water dir. Guillermo del Toro 

Buster Keaton

Dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí in Spellbound, 1945 | Alfred Hitchcock.