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pommedelamer · 2 years

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last summer

Emerging from a dank highway underpass in late July,

Two paddle boards slid atop the inky black stillness beneath,

Their paths suddenly converging into a single vibration,

Blurring into the catharsis of a plucked guitar string.

Warm muscles curdled taut by the impact

Of two round, foamy noses bumping against one another,

I said

I think they’re in love.

Your smile materialized in simple shapes

Like the first forms borne from a portrait artist’s broad, gentle brush

As my glasses, flung clumsily off my face a mile back,

Settled into murky depths,

Your fine details dissolving in the soft cradle of the lake.

It’s even more peaceful when you can’t really see,

I had called over my shoulder to you,

Skin still sopping from the startling plunge,

Easing into the cushiony abstraction of the forms that filled my vision,

Bobbing, black, and blurry

Blurry as if on the brink of something,

A memory,

As if the fuzziness may give way to something else,

To the contours of an earlier time,

An earlier day, with you.

Serene, you hummed,

And I remembered then that your vision has always been imperfect,

Muddled slightly by wandering outlines that you refuse to subdue with lenses,

And with that recollection,

I risked another topple to turn my head across the water to the hazy form that was you,

Imagining your two eyes,

Calm, defiant, college-bound,

And privy to the fuzzy ache of memory.

#writers on tumblr #writing #writeblr #poetry #short poem #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #my poetry

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pommedelamer · 2 years

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kill your darlings

(a shitty rewrite of an old poem of mine that aged poorly & whose emotional content no longer feels genuine but no one will ever see this so it’s fine:))

So often I have had to exile a most cherished sentence to the wastebasket from which no sentence can ever return,

Surrendering beautiful bits of language for the sake of a plot,

A work.

Yet there is not an instance that my pencil does not waver on its axis before the slaughter,

That my fingertips do not stutter on the fatal key.

The darlings prey on my hesitation;

This is their chance, they know, to overwhelm me,

Beating their wings in my chest cavity, leaving a taste of ambrosia in my mouth as they fall from my lips, collecting in dazzling pools behind my eyelids, imploring me to taste, to see, to be moved.

They fight, they sing,

They are everything that is tempting about language at 3am, when the world is asleep.

They conjure images like this––

You, slipping in with the winter chill in the middle of the night,

Venturing into the darkest darks of my room, shaking me awake, guiding me down to the spot on the carpet where our childhood passed us by, legs criss-crossed, back when there was no conceivable reason to worry about forgetting.

Of all the darlings I’ve had to kill, you are the most persistent.

The metaphors you’ve gotten out of me are the most alluring I’ve ever known,

And I write myself into knots developing them,

Sanding them down into barren wastelands, fine-tuning and reworking the language until there is nowhere left for it to go.

But this is no way to write, I know.

I stand and lead you through the dark, feeling my way down the hallway,

Gripping pages of metaphors in my hands,

Metaphors that carry the weight of a childhood,

And also, strangely, nothing at all.

It’s snowing as you step into my driveway, and I think I could write volumes about the volumes spoken by your eyes into mine as you stare at me through the window,

But then I’m flipping the page and the icy wind is blowing you up and over the snowy hill,

Killing you with every gust, and

I imagine your body collecting in little pieces on the far side like soft, papery, ink-stained snowfall.

#poetry #poem #spilled poem #writers on tumblr #poets on tumblr #writing #writeblr #spilled ink

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pommedelamer · 3 years

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tagged by @still-life-with :) ily

fave color: it’s always been more about the shade for me, so I can’t say I have one. that being said. wine red, copenhagen blue, and moody browns and greens have been hitting different lately

currently reading: uhhhhh to be honest. aside from the books that I read with the kids I tutor, nothing atm. however, I bought a couple from barnes and noble the other day & I’m looking forward to reading those

last movie: in the heights :D

last series: I’d rather not say. we’re gonna go with arrested development

sweet, spicy, or savory?: definitely savory & it’s not even close tbh. spicy is le runner up

craving: instant mac <3 and normalcy

tea/coffee: tea tea tea. unsweetened iced black tea will be my starbucks order for eternity & green tea on a school night is simply unparalleled. I do feel that this could change over time; I sense a caffeine addiction on the horizon

currently working on: a colored pencil portrait !!!!!! also a pastel piece !!!!! and hopefully a poem in the near future

I don’t have a lot of friends on here so I’m “tagging” everyone who has some time to kill

#this was fun

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pommedelamer · 3 years

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Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

#gkdgjdfjfdg #to read

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pommedelamer · 3 years

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negative space

I meant it when I told my ceiling that the birthdays didn’t matter to me

I’ll let the dandelion summers shrivel up in my drawers if you want me to,

and there’s a lovely aroma of death and flora hanging in the air tonight.

If you have a moment, I’d quite like you to

slip in with the winter chill in the middle of the night and

feel your way down the hallway.

(don’t ask, I know you know the way.)

Put the years I gave you for safekeeping on my bedside table while I sleep

whisper your story to the comforter mountains until they stir and crease in recognition in the silvery moonlight,

turn your fingertips into dust and sprinkle yourself in the soles of my shoes, and

wake up on my bedroom floor, eyes dry so I know you never left.

You must understand that three years in one night is a running tap inside my chest cavity,

you must understand that you’ve scraped all my slates clean, so

forgive me if I plead you not to leave before I can finish remembering you.

Could I render you in ink before you go?

These days my thoughts are delusions until I immortalize them on paper

I don’t see why you’d be any different.

If you don’t stare at the photos on my wall

I promise I won’t cry when I see the snow in your hair,

I’ll pretend I don’t know what makes your blood gush and curdle in your veins and you’ll pretend you haven’t forgotten this,

and I’ll scribble and you’ll dig up the dried dandelions in my drawers until your body is blown over the hills with the next snowfall

and I’m left with restless, aching hands and pages and pages of negative space.

#don't have anything to post so I'm just gonna rb this and pretend like that's an adequate substitute #working on something new rn though!!!!#rb #poetry #writeblr

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pommedelamer · 3 years

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negative space

I meant it when I told my ceiling that the birthdays didn’t matter to me

I’ll let the dandelion summers shrivel up in my drawers if you want me to,

and there’s a lovely aroma of death and flora hanging in the air tonight.

If you have a moment, I’d quite like you to

slip in with the winter chill in the middle of the night and

feel your way down the hallway.

(don’t ask, I know you know the way.)

Put the years I gave you for safekeeping on my bedside table while I sleep

whisper your story to the comforter mountains until they stir and crease in recognition in the silvery moonlight,

turn your fingertips into dust and sprinkle yourself in the soles of my shoes, and

wake up on my bedroom floor, eyes dry so I know you never left.

You must understand that three years in one night is a running tap inside my chest cavity,

you must understand that you’ve scraped all my slates clean, so

forgive me if I plead you not to leave before I can finish remembering you.

Could I render you in ink before you go?

These days my thoughts are delusions until I immortalize them on paper

I don’t see why you’d be any different.

If you don’t stare at the photos on my wall

I promise I won’t cry when I see the snow in your hair,

I’ll pretend I don’t know what makes your blood gush and curdle in your veins and you’ll pretend you haven’t forgotten this,

and I’ll scribble and you'll dig up the dried dandelions in my drawers until your body is blown over the hills with the next snowfall

and I’m left with restless, aching hands and pages and pages of negative space.

#writers #writing #writblr #written #free write #poetry #free verse #poem #poems on tumblr #words #spilled ink #young writer #poets on tumblr #writers of tumblr #writer #impulse poem

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pommedelamer · 4 years

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I was tagged by @still-life-with !!! thanks bby

last movie i saw: gaslight and wait until dark !!!! my mom is making us watch vintage psychological thrillers and I can’t say I’m opposed :-)

last song i listened to: the long and winding road by the beatles :>

last book i read: ummm a psych book for school!!! opening skinner’s box by lauren slater :) for personal reading,,, david and goliath by malcom gladwell. I like fiction I promise. I need to read more though :///

last thing i ate: buffalo cauliflower, a sandwich, and pickles. the trifecta of champions

if i could be anywhere rn, where would i be: on a windy cape cod beach in the darkness. not a person in sight except for my two best friends right beside me at the top of a lifeguard chair. listening to the crashing waves and letting the past and future just ebb away for a moment. maybe starting to cry a little because of the unfathomable nature of infinity and the tenderness of life who knows. if this seems specific it’s because I lived it this summer and I want it back ;(

where would i time travel: hffkhf I’ve never actually thought about this. umm don’t hold me to this because there are definitely cooler places but just off the top of my head,,,,back to the beginning of humanity. I want to see people figuring out that holding animal carcasses over fire makes a decent (perhaps undercooked if it was the first try lol) meal. I want to see the earliest forms of creativity and self-expression. I want to see language as we know it being stitched together. that sounds fucking sick bro

fictional character i’d hang out with: bruhh there are so many. but I feel like every character from every book I’ve ever read just evaporated from my mind so I’m just going to say the entirety of the weasley family lmao

hEY @often-forgotten your turn <333

#tag game #movies #me projecting my fear of infinity #these are so fun

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pommedelamer · 4 years

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inktober day 18; trap

s/o to tumblr for perpetually ruining my quality :))) it’s fine :))) but !!! here’s a fun (albeit very late) (and albeit kinda dark) inktober doodle. kudos to anyone who can actually understand what the fuck is going on here (there’s a lot lol). maybe a couple more of these to come before halloween :D

#inktober #ink #ink art #artists on tumblr #pen and ink #pen sketch #sketches #inktober 2020 #artist #doodles #art #october #illustration #trap #sketchbook #sketch #this is bad sorry

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pommedelamer · 4 years

Photo

inktober day 4- radio

my camera quality is. not the best :/ but it was super super cathartic to make this, especially after abandoning art for a few months. I hope you enjoy :) maybe more days coming soon ??

#inktober #inktober2020 #pen and ink #artists on tumblr #october #illustration #drawing #art #my art #skeleton #radio #ink #pen #sketchbook #sketch #yes I drew the sound waves with wite out what about it #moon #night

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pommedelamer · 4 years

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personality quiz: do you think the sexiest fruit is pomegranate, mango, peach, cherry, raspberry, strawberry, or banana

#i mean #objectively #peaches or cherries for sure #but personally #I think pomegranates are definitely sexc #not all of us sexualizing fruit #i feel like i should say mangoes but i've never once had a positive experience with amango #they're always a let down and that doesn't exactly scream secks yknow #by positive experience I mean like #taste-wise #just so we're clear #okay #probably deleting tomorrow n e way

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pommedelamer · 4 years

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tales from the junkyard

I’m back and I’ve come with double the oversharing :’). ngl,,,,, I’ve been in a really bad place recently and haven’t really had any motivation to write (other than fleeting impulses like this one). However, I came across a prompt about writing to your 14 year-old self and decided to run with it in the most bleak way possible. I’ve been wanting to try out second person for a while so I suppose this is also a testament to that. This is incredibly bad but I felt compelled to post for some reason. Oh, and before we begin:

**HUGE tw for body dysmorphia/ eating disorders! I tried my best to get back into the ‘disordered’ mindset to adhere the closest to my own experience as I could, so there's a ton of potentially triggering imagery involved. Please please don’t go any further if these are touchy subjects for you; the last thing I want to do is trigger someone with my writing. Lastly, if anyone wants to discuss their own experiences or simply talk to someone, my messages are always open.**

//

Winter had long since dug its spindly fingers into suburban Massachusetts and the strip malls were beginning to look vaguely apocalyptic, parking lots thinning out after the holidays and the last tired shoppers scampering between stores like flitting hummingbirds. People were hibernating behind their laptops in the bookstore Starbucks and watching the dark snuff out the sun inside frosted Honda Civics, boots propped up on dashboards as radio monotone and sputtering engines droned on behind closed doors.

Seemingly overnight months before, the trees shook off their technicolor coats and left the whole world cold. In front of the Marshalls at the edge of a line of stores, an automatic door hummed, reluctantly parting for you and your friends. You unfurled your fists inside your mittens, preparing for the rush of warmth. When the door’s petulant hum was lost beneath the pump of early 2000′s pop music, the heat rushed to fog up your glasses. But it did not spread its palms over your skin or nudge at your heart like you remembered. Something peculiar had taken hold on your body as of late, rushing in slyly alongside the winter chill. It appeared that nothing seemed to be doing what it was supposed to, as if you’d been soaking in repellent. Nothing succeeded in entering, or dared to. The thought made you ache underneath your coat, but you didn't have words for that and you didn’t feel like seeking them out, so you found yourself following your friends into a dressing room, down a hallway. Who would have thought to find us here?

You felt the iced mocha you’d consumed on the far side of the strip mall curl up and die alone in the pit of your stomach as you crawled out from under your coat and fumbled noncommittally with the hem of your shirt. Who could have possibly suggested this? Your back was plastered to the door as two balls of whirling gaseous energy, swimming in the sickly dressing room light, prattled on about midterms and wriggled their jeans down their legs.

You were on the brink of orchestrating your grand egress to the furniture section when the taller girl freed herself from her shirt and something crawled out of your body on unsteady legs and into her. You recognized the edges and delicate protrusions under her tan skin like they were your own, the gears whirring underneath her chest and the tent stakes running all the way up her arms. A well-oiled machine. The cheap polyester fabrics dangling from the hangers in your hands licked at your ankles as you stood, gaping and wooden. It took the vaguely familiar pile of clothes, shriveled up like snakeskin at her feet, to remind you that this was your friend. The washed-out, scrap metal nymph with the angular metallic face was your friend. Maybe even a best friend. Some part of you, howling and gesticulating from the distance, thought that this was an important detail.

Yet your eyes were dazzled and your chest was hollow and slowly beginning to fill with sand. You’d pieced her together in the dreariest corners of your being, whittling away at yourself until the sun showed its warm face on your bedroom wall. You’d risen her up from the ashes with scrap metal and severed car parts, like some sort of junkyard automaton. She dwelt within your darkest corners and loneliest back alleys, knowing the rush of your blood like a prayer and the pump of your heart like her own.

Yes, you’d felt her at your core, writhing under an ocean of blood and organs and skin, --too much skin-- repulsed by her surroundings. I know you are, I am too, I promise I’ll give you a better home. To exalt her was to indulge, and, shivering into your blankets like a moth to lamp light, you indulged yourself every night, the drone of your stomach reverent in the dark. But there she stood, now clothed in floral print and a wonderful, delicate paleness that fanned over her cheeks like a fresh snowfall. Why had she attached herself so unflinchingly to the girl at the mirror? Had you not spent hours trying to lure her out of you like a curse, mumbling incantations into your pillow until she showed her narrow face? You had to admit that the long brown hair suited her better than yours ever could.

The shorter of your two friends was busying herself with the button on her jeans, muttering something about the pile of clothes she had neatly reattached to their hangers. How long had you been watching? The musings of your heart had no use for time, but the inside of the Marshalls dressing room had no interest in your heart. Part of you --perhaps the very same part that found your best friend in all the scrap metal-- wished that someone did.

Your shirt had somehow picked its way over your head and down your legs, joining your jeans, to your horror, on the tiled floor. You lunged forward to gather up the denim and polyester and the miles and miles of skin that oozed past your fingertips like a dispersing battalion and pulled you down with them. Then there was the crook of your arm, the heaving of your shoulders, the sense of your axes spinning out of control, into the void. Your breath thickened in your throat and you let the universe whirl off kilter. Your palms slid on the tile and you had a vague sense of something leaking at the seams between your fingers. It was then that you knew you were doomed-- Antigone en route to her bridal-bed.

Emerging from the briny haze was a stream of voices and two pairs of hands on your back (you couldn’t help but recognize the narrowness of her wrists). You had never felt so heavy; your chest was now completely filled up with sand and your knees were pushing all the way through the floor. Your skin was filling up the room. Words were soft and full like couch cushions as you scrambled back into your clothes. But the stares gathered on your sightline like phantoms and you felt yourself unraveling as your socks swallowed you up and your shoes tied themselves. You pushed on the door far too late and tore into the hallway, untried dresses and shirts billowing on their hangers close behind.

You pressed yourself against a wall and your breath came fast. Whatever that thing was had a stuttering heartbeat --you had felt it through its wrists-- and was kneeling and drying up and dying on the dressing room floor and you were alone. Clothing hangers dangled from your clasped hands, rattling like crazed marionettes as the rivulets dried on your cheeks and the panic rushed through you all at once.

When you’re fourteen and every hair follicle aches for the sickly and every drone of the stomach lusts after the feverish, the poison has many faces. You’re so intoxicated that you can’t see that some of them are drowning too when you pass them on the way down, not until their limbs are flailing in the depths and you’re looking up at them with water in your lungs.

#words #writing #writers #writeblr #writers of tumblr #prose #letter to myself #tw body dysmorphia #tw eating disorders #tw anorexia #vent tw #spilled ink #i need a hug lol #maybe this wasn't the healthiest thing to write #but i needed to post something

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pommedelamer · 4 years

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Poems By POC

Star Gazing by Dominique Christina (tw: sexual assault)

A Woman Speaks by Audre Lorde

The Moon Is Trans by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Rhonda, Age 15, Emergency Room by Letta Neely

My Story in the Late Style of Fire by Larry Lewis

Beverly Hills, Chicago by Gwendolyn Brooks

Blue by Carl Phillips (one of my favorites)

Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

P.O.C. by ALLIIYANG (another one of my favorites)

There Are Birds Here by Jamaal May

Trigger by Porsha Olayiwola

All The Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto (tw: death, police brutality, homophobia, q word)

Second Attempt At Crossing by Javier Zamora

“Why Can’t Black People Just Write About Flowers?” by Aziza Barnes

Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Here is a collection of black-written poetry.

After reading these, if you have the means, go purchase their books and works to support them.

#these are all incredible #wow wow wow #poetry #poems by poc

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pommedelamer · 4 years

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in my heart, you’re sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor

(basically a prosaic yet impassioned lament on childhood and sisterhood that’s oddly specific to me lol)

In those moments when I remember I was not sprung into this world just under six feet with a bookbag pressed to my spine, I always end up in that backyard. The long rows of jagged rocks carved out the grass that glowed navy blue in the moonlight into little islands upon which our limbs thrashed playfully in the night, our outstretched arms unencumbered by the pressing weight of self-image that would come to inhabit itself in us in the coming years. But through the frayed mesh of the trampoline net, even the tomorrows were light years away. Smoke was perpetually ascending from the black grill near the far fence, the remnants of the night’s cookout.

Your backyard at night was a universe of its own, grass taking on its own aroma beneath the dimming sky, air veiled in the euphoria of being alive and being alive with a best friend. It was a realm unlike any fantasy landscape tucked inside my favorite picture books, because, for all its allure and mysticism, it was real. Our days were cast in paper mache and clouded with sidewalk chalk dust, marinating in thick smoke underneath the protective arms of dozens of towering oak trees.

When the glow of your room light teeters on your windowsill and spills onto my driveway late at night (I know you’ve always liked it on, I never got much sleep in your room after all), I wonder if you remember the way you gingerly pressed both your palms to my back, that night on the trampoline together when I became acquainted with the trials and tribulations of the back handspring. I never had much athletic prowess, and you knew it. But the way you floated through time and space on those mornings and evenings made me want to float with you, giddy and weightless, suspended in the years of Dairy Queen and swiveling living room chairs and dance routines we choreographed for our parents (we would always insist that they saw every movement, whirling and panting until your mother exchanged a look with mine that we both couldn’t understand and said that we should be getting home, but we’ll being seeing you very soon and we whined and cried but the promise of a day with one another was enough to quell the sticky partings on our cheeks).

Even now, my footsteps send resounding echoes down our street that whisper of our door-to-door stage makeup business (short-lived and admittedly hasty in its execution, but full of potential to the eleven year old mind), of our August afternoons spent in your kitchen, raiding your cabinets to satisfy our voracious preteen appetites as we chattered on about our first days of school, stuttering through our words that could not possibly align themselves with the speed of the whimsical, giddy prose brewing in our heads. I anticipated the arrival of the cherry-red car in your driveway every afternoon with the attentiveness of a sprinter to a starting gun. Clad in boxy shorts and garish graphic tees, we scrambled to each other’s doorsteps, brimming with lunchtime anecdotes and the newest romantic endeavors of the students of the Dunning and Potter Road Elementary Schools. We set out on afternoon bike rides like intrepid adventurers up Everest and our eyes were dazzled with the prospect of riding the same bus, of yet another home together outside the blissful confines of our street.

And when the school year tapered off into summer, we went with it. The elegant pears and supple oranges in the fruit bowl by my kitchen window became yours, and your little brother’s fleshy hands and the grand piano in your living room became mine (I used to plant my fingers on the keys like they belonged to me). We wiggled our fingers and toes in the metallic haziness of the same vast sunsets, turned cartwheels into the night, and returned to our respective doorsteps barefoot and coated in a plethora of bruises and assuaging films of perspiration. In the winter months, we bundled ourselves in pesky snow pants and bound our necks in thick fleece scarves and exhaled our favorite songs into the frigid air atop your roof. We invented our own language (which bore a suspicious resemblance to pig latin) and curled up on my bedroom floor, our cheeks pressed to the carpet as we spoke of first kisses and first periods and who, between us, would be the first to navigate the tumultuous waters of each (predictions that we scrawled into the pages of my purple lock-bound journal that had really come to be ours, your wide-set handwriting mingling with my scraggly lettering in the margins).

We talked of building tunnels underneath our houses so that when the clock estranged us, the dirt beneath our feet was intertwined. We had the kind of bond that was strong in its subtlety, in the way our days unfolded naturally into nights that revealed themselves under the stars before we could mourn the sun’s loss. In the way we burrowed the balls of our feet into our sneakers and stumbled (silhouetted against the darkening, omnipresent cloak of sky) to my doorstep, sweeping up the unwieldy overnight bag I had not yet unpacked from last time. Then we would swing the front door open again and tear back across your yard, motion sensor lights illuminating the murky way as my parents bade me a distant goodnight through the mesh of my open window. We tiptoed down your hallway, chests heaving as we contained our excitement for the short, creaky stretch so as not to wake your grandmother who slept in the room adjacent to your own. You would arrange your stuffed animals on your bed (Sheepy, the charmingly stout pillow pet, was both of our favorites; I was never allowed to touch him) and we watched our favorite sitcom and devoured your collection of Guinness World Record books until our foreheads ached from all the sensory input and our eyelids pleaded for our bodies to be still. And even then, you chose a sleeping bag over your own bed to accompany me on the floor.

I can only define our time together as a long stretch of nights spent reveling in the sheer joy of the day and the days ahead as my consciousness tiptoed down the nape of my neck and drowned itself in the folds of my red sleeping bag. I wonder how many nights we spent acquiescing to the allure of sleep like this, basking in the enchanting luminescence of your nightlight and curled up beside your bed, your prowling cats slinking around our limp bodies in the dark on impossibly light feet.

There were quiet days, and the silences were a part of us too. But one time, a day apart became a weekend, became a season, and when our paths did converge, I was blinded by all the ways you’d changed (I remember seeing you in the driveway that autumn afternoon under the rustling multicolored canopy of leaves, being struck by how tall you looked next to the impressive group of friends you’d drawn into your orbit after our axes spun out of sync). I felt our childhood slowly ebbing away in the quiet landlines and forgotten party invites (or perhaps they just got lost in the abyss between our houses). The pears in my fruit bowl must have gone sour because you no longer desired to taste them. I’ve long since scrubbed off the residue from where your fingers laced with mine in the driveway, but my clothes are still perpetually damp with it. I want to scrutinize your face for signs, but I’m afraid there is no imprint of me at your core in the way there is one of you at mine, legs criss-crossed on my bedroom floor.

I have no memory of our partings in the same way I have no recollection of our first interactions. One day sixteen years ago you flung your tiny arm across my shoulders and we stumbled through life intertwined, equipped with each other and a single pair of eyes. We never had to ask each other where we came from; we grew up on Friday night concerts on the green, on driveway chalk dust, on linked fingers and takeout in your basement.

We didn’t have the words for all the intricacies and feelings back then, and I’m now just finding them in my throat, gripping on for dear life, and wringing out all the bittersweet juice I can. It’s an unfamiliar taste, but I think that the saccharine sweetness --embittered by the time it pools in my stomach-- is reminiscent of a thank you. A thank you for letting me know you in a way I’ve never known anyone else, or maybe never will again. I don’t dare think that we’ve run our course; it was all too beautiful to be temporary.

My arms are sprawled across your cool countertops, I’m standing silhouetted in the moonlight in your yard, I’m leeching off the smoke ascending from the grill like a parasite traveling through time. You’ll never see this but I’ll never stop trying to hold on, even at bay.

//

a/n: woah that was 1.5k of nostalgic whining (probably with a few grammatical errors in there as well). no one will read this far but if u did,,,,,,,,, thank you so much & I hope you enjoyed!!!!! I know this is specifically tailored to my own life experiences, but I really really hope it still made an impression on readers. hehhh well yea thanks for reading lol

#writer #writers #writers of tumblr #writblr #written #writing #writeblr #prose #spilled ink #words #wordsoftheday #authors #free write #young writer #angst #im so sorry for this

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pommedelamer · 4 years

Text

Bold the statements that resonate most with you

tagged by @still-life-with <3333 mwah

never took myself as a dark academia/ edgy gal :oooo what do I do with this information. I unfortunately don’t have a lot of friends on this app but I nominate the amazing @often-forgotten and literally anyone else to do this next :) twas a journey

#dark academia #edgy aesthetic #I now feel compelled to embody these lol #this was fucking fun

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pommedelamer · 4 years

Text

art of the pen

a/n: soo uhh it’s been a while. here’s a couple pages worth of a story idea I had, as well as my character design that inspired it! this is. extremely rough but I figured that I should get something up. hhhh I was considering turning this into a formal book with actual developed characters and plot advancement (oh god saying that gives me anxiety) but I don’t know if the content I have so far is very promising. lmk what y'all think lol

//

Character Description: This character is a young female writer. When the novel she has poured her life’s work into is denounced by publishers, she withdraws to a foreign country in attempts to kindle the flames of a new life and reignite her passion for writing. Rejection, coupled with extreme loneliness, causes her to sink into depression. She wanders aimlessly through her new remote town in search of a sense of community. She comes across this in the last place she expected when she discovers that the decrepit building in which she temporarily resides is inhabited by a troop of eccentric underground journalists. Alongside her intrepid neighbors, she tears into the controversies and secrets woven into the fabric of her town and writes like she never has before.

//

The sun peeked through the gaps in the verdant canopy above, but my journal pages were still mostly barren. My pen always seemed to still a few sentences in, flailing like a line unable to lure in a bite. I flipped back to the cover, sluggish in the evening heat. It was adorned with pressed indigo flowers on a cream-colored background. Some of the pigment in the flowers had escaped under the pressure, and each blossom was framed with a deep purple halo. The wind sent the pages tumbling in a delicate fan, and suddenly I was a vandal, a delinquent with the gall to tarnish such beauty with the aftershocks of a passion that had run its course.

A cloud crossed over the sun and the forest floor seemed to close itself off, a flourishing ecosystem in which I was a parasite, leeching off its natural resources to fuel my own unavailing pursuits. I felt the crabgrass clawing at the soles of my feet as I reread the fruits of my two hours. Oh. My breath thickened in my throat and the canopy of branches above shifted in the wind. I suddenly felt compelled to trek back to the little corner market and seek forgiveness for the heinous crimes I’d committed inside the lovely journal with the flowers festooned across the front. And then I’d make a pit stop back at my publisher’s to apologize for my persistence with that novel I’d probably packed with even more of my insufferable delusions. My pen felt leaden and foreign in my hand, and I let it fall to the forest floor in penitence.

I stood up and saw that a thicket of scraggly trees was eyeing me curiously. It could just be a hobby, I told them. They remained steadfast, bony limbs still contorted in thorny skepticism. I didn’t quite know what they sought from me, but I wanted to oblige them. Something to unwind with in the afternoons. The forest was drawing further and further away from me, the thrushes and jays flocking in the leaves of a far-off pine tree, the wind gently guiding the little saplings away on their scrawny legs. A shadow crossed over my bones, and I knew that it was a lie. I wanted to crawl out of the skeleton that had confidently put pen to paper every morning and leave the remnants to disintegrate on the forest floor. I scooped up the marred pages of the little journal and tucked it away. Just something to pass the time. If that.

❋❋❋

The town had fully transformed itself when I crossed onto Washington Street. The daytime freshness had long since evaporated from the air, a numbing sense of finality sliding into its place, a reflective epilogue on the day passed. The possibility that I’d felt on my trek to the market that very morning remained in the air, and, silhouetted against the cloak of night, it was mystifying and beckoned me through the alleyways and over the crosswalks. In spite of my spirits, my eyes were dazzled with it. I watched as my shadow, elongated by the streetlamps, tapered off into drains and crept up the sides of buildings, beguiling the eye with its disappearances and reappearances.

I arrived at my complex and allowed myself a moment to take it in at nighttime for the first time. Unlike some of the buildings that retained their daytime charm in the dark, 42 Washington Street took on an air of its own. The streetlamps threw long, delicate shadows over the siding, and the balconies seemed to withdraw back into the wall for the night.

I fumbled with my keys and let myself in. I was immediately enveloped with cool air that seemed awfully artificial, if the sputtering air conditioner on the far wall was any indication. The lobby had also fully adopted the nighttime guise, the broad armchairs appearing to purposefully hold their poses in the dark, as if they had once been dancing. Even the idyllic watercolor gondola painting mounted on the wall behind the front desk had shifted in the night, now depicting rafts traversing the inky river Styx.

“Your first night at 42 Washington, I assume?”

It took me a moment to locate the speaker, tracing over the corners of the room that the moonlight had claimed. It was only when I stepped back and observed the room again, allowing my gaze to slip beyond the cool puddles of light on the wooden armrests and coffee table, that I found the source.

Completely submerged in shadow, a man was reclining on a velvet armchair. Even entirely cloaked in dark, I could tell that he was incredibly tall, almost larger than life. One of his legs draped over the side of the chair, and his foot still managed to touch the ground. His left hand curved over the other arm of the chair, spanning the entire width. He wore a plain button up, the hem of which fanned out onto the chair. I saw an object on his lap that I recognized from my own fruitless pursuits, as a journal. His was almost bursting at the seams, the binding probably beginning to fray under the stress. I saw movement inside the shadow that overtook half the man’s face, swallowing up his likeness so that his features were still up to my imagination.

“It’s a completely different place in the dark, all transformed and the like. One might say we have two buildings for the price of one. It’s a bit of a joke around here.” He spoke as if he were scribbling on a page, the drawl of his voice trying desperately to align itself with the words in his head – as if I’d walked in on him in the middle of constructing his own universe and it hadn’t quite stopped for me. My eyes fell on the fountain pen dangling between his fingers that I’d dismissed as a cigarette, and I realized that was exactly what he had been doing. “But it’s best to keep it between us. If the landlord catches on, you can expect rent to double in price. All the apartments are the same around here, and the landlords are no different. They’ll take anything they can get.” He laughed faintly, and the shadow shortened as if the man had tipped his head back, lost in thought. There was a brief silence, during which I realized I hadn’t yet uttered a single word. “Are you a writer too, then?”

The question was wholly disarming, catching me right between the ribs. I hoped that the night would obscure the rivers of uncertainty it sent ghosting over my skin and coursing through my veins. My heartbeat rattled against my ribcage as I willed myself to respond.

“I’ve dabbled in it. So one might say I am, but ... no, I suppose I’m not, by definition, anyway.” I was again grateful for the anonymity the night provided, for my voice was telling a story of its own, one that I’d recently established was no longer mine. “What might give you that impression?”

The man shifted forwards, the contours of his face revealing themselves inside the beam of moonlight that fell at his feet. I rushed to dismantle the collage of shadowed features I’d loosely fabricated in my head, although it was not far off from what the moonlight illuminated before my eyes. I observed that, for as much as he liked to talk about it, the man’s face was not like 42 Washington Street. “We have a certain look about us, I s’pose.”

My hands wrung behind my back as he propped his elbows on his knees. I couldn’t help but wonder what else he’d detected during this shadowed analysis. I was sure the distress his question had instilled in me had not gone unnoticed, but he did not question it. He did not question me, and I did not question him.

The man skimmed through the pages of the teeming journal and produced a piece of brown paper that, from the looks of it, had been folded up to four times. “If I’m right in my assessments and you’re interested, there’s a group of us around here. I think we’d all be open to more writers in a town like this.” He placed the paper in my palm, and I nodded.

I unfurled the paper and scanned it quickly as I walked. I was already halfway down the hall when a blank space on the flyer piqued my curiosity. “Excuse me, sir, the address-- it seems to be missing?”

But the enormous man had already eased back in the armchair, hands closing around the journal as the shadows overtook him once more. “It does have the feel of a haunted house around here, doesn’t it?” He mumbled into the dark.

*~to be continued~*

feedback would be appreciated :)

#writers #excerpt from a book i'll never write #writing #amwriting #writeblr #authors #creative writing #this is really bad sorry #writblr #written #words #free write #writers of tumblr #wip #current wip

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pommedelamer · 4 years

Text

undone

Love me today,

because there will be a time

when daylight suffocates itself inside the cloak of dark, a time

for us to come home to ourselves.

a time to drown the coat hangers of the world in our partings,

to leave the dried-up conversations hanging between our jean jackets and windbreakers,

sodden with the words we didn’t say.

to undo ourselves before our mirrors and to peel back our bedspreads,

seeping into ourselves as the world dims behind our blinds,

seeping into our solitude,

and feeling our souls settle into our skeletons

for the night.

Love me today,

because I can feel the noiseless lull of the moon enticing the light on the backs of my hands

and though I can see you here,

blood undulating beneath skin,

I know you belong to yourself and not I.

yet even in the dark,

my fingertips find themselves tracing pictures on the sheets,

and I think that there is nothing more artistic than this,

to be so consumed with life that you etch it into your bedspread when the day has eluded you

so the night can feel it too.

Love me today, because

i’ll never be more me than I am right now, and you’ll never be more you,

and though the clock has estranged you and I,

we’ll never be more us.

i’ll never feel your presence as acutely as I do in the dark tonight,

for the timid midday sun still illuminates your forearms as warmly

and the words I said to you today still mold your face as effortlessly, and

I don’t need to close my eyes to see you,

but I do.

Love me today,

because the thought of you scrawls poetry behind my eyes

and I wonder who holds the pen that plays upon you in the night,

and if not I,

if a stray sentence fragment or dangling clause has perhaps, in its idiosyncrasy,

cast apparitions of me about your room while you sleep.

how miserable and beautiful it is

that you come home to you,

and I to me.

a/n: hi this is bad and unedited. I haven’t been in the best mindset as of late but I have done some free verse drabble stuff like this. It’s nothing special but it feels good to get back into writing again. Hopefully there will be better works coming your way.

#writers #writing #writblr #written #free write #poetry #free verse #poem #poets on tumblr #words #spilled ink #young writer #poems on tumblr #writers of tumblr #wip #angst

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pommedelamer · 4 years

Text

pandemic

I step outside, and my suburban streets tell me stories.

The sound of my footsteps works in tandem with the wind,

And the trees tilt their long necks into the road to eavesdrop on the last wanderers.

I take comfort in the untrodden ground,

In the vast expanse of sky stretching over hushed roads and barren cul de sacs

Like taut skin over protruding bones,

In the canopy of intertwined branches above, cutting up the sky into shards of baby blue.

I step outside, and the world is mine to implore for the answers to all my questions,

But this is a world tucked inside apartment buildings and enclosed under sloping roofs,

A world confined in square footage and haunted by fleeting apparitions whispering about the unknown.

We tread across our suburban neighborhoods alone,

The snap of a branch or the gentle graze of the wind against the backs of our hands curdling our rushing blood.

And we thin out like an aging scalp, plagued with a crumbling world that keeps us up at night,

Running its nails down our backs and taking apart our lives and letting the blood run down,

Pooling in our collarbones and reflecting back images of our worst fears that close our doors and keep them shut.

I step outside, and we’ve grown farther and farther apart now.

You’ve grown distant,

The way you cling to the other side of the street like a flitting moth to a lantern when you see our paths converging.

I wonder what spirits have wracked your frame so violently that

The streets we grew up on together seize you in the night

And the echo of my lace-up boots sends chills down your spine.

Through my kitchen window,

The wind plays a shrill melody on blades of grass and ruffles the frail shrubs like a mousy head of hair.

The evening rain tiptoes out on light feet, leaving the air buzzing with electricity in its wake.

I see crocuses poking through the sodden earth, purple and alabaster blossoms arising from their slumber

Only to find the world wracked with a heavy silence,

Tricycles and sprinklers strewn about over unkempt lawns, the bloody carnage of a war that never happened.

Souls breathing their own air behind drawn curtains, inhaling and exhaling

With the hopes that one day, these streets will be theirs again.

⚘⚘⚘

a/n: been taking a lot of walks recently and it gives me clarity amidst all the panic and fear that’s been circulating around lately. I hope we can all stay calm and healthy during unprecedented times. this too shall pass. <33 also this really sucks

#creative writing #writers #writblr #writers of tumblr #literature #poetry #drabble #authors #free write #prose #creativity #words #pandemic #coronavirus #covid19 #quarantine writing

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