#lyric essay
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Maggie Nelson, from Bluets
[Text ID: “Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?”]
#maggie nelson#love#madness#unrequited love#blue#disturbance#excerpts#writings#literature#prose poetry#lyric essay#fragments#selections#quotes#lit#words#typography#american literature
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Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn't.
Here is a story where everything goes wrong, here is a story where everyone has their back against the wall, here is a story where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don't, they'll die.
Here is a story, not of good and evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.
How are you supposed to fall asleep like this?
-Hansel, Richard Siken
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Baudelaire Street - Chen Li
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Tuesday Thoughts
If I thought “I Love You” was enough to encapsulate all I feel for you, then maybe I wouldn’t be so afraid to say it. Perhaps I’ll dance around those three words, sending paragraphs and big blocks of blue text on my iPhone in hopes that more words mean more than these three words – these three loaded words you seem to dance around, too.
You have been my ex for over a year now, and I know deep…
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#breakup#confusion#identity#love#lyric essay#Nonfiction#poetry#reality#relationships#thoughts#tuesday
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Swerve by Brenda Miller, published in issue 31 of Brevity literary journal
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in the movie
In the Mood for Love
Chow Mo-Wan & Su Li-Zhen fall in love
after role playing as their spouses
who are having an affair together
In the Mood for Love is about
how there is no escape for us
[in ]
in pretending to be a secret
they actually become one
accidentally finding
something of their own
to guard
& to lose
in All Too Well (10 minute version)
Taylor Swift sings
you kept me like a secret
but I kept you like an oath
these turns of phrases
suggest that
what we keep
is always in relation to
[in service of]
what we have to lose
[both what is in our possession
& what we necessarily will lose]
perhaps
even-especially
what
[who]
we’ve already lost
anyone living
trulyliving
is a beautiful loser
because we’re all holding on
to something
maybe even more than one thing
we’ve already lost
what’s not a secret
is how often I notice hands
a while ago
possibly in October because in my mind everything happened in October
I ask –
do you think the way we touch others is the way we wish to be touched
often it takes us well into a scene to realize that Mo-Wan & Li-Zhen are acting
[as their spouses
who of course quickly become a stand-in for
]
forgetting that because it’s a movie
they are of course always acting
all this eventually adds up to a total confusion
over the definition of acting
over when they are secretly serious
when they are acting like they’re acting
over when they are secretly acting
when they are acting like they’re serious
In the Mood for Love takes a long time
to e n d
I mean that Wong Kar-Wai gives us so many scenes after their parting
but I also mean that maybe the whole film is an end
because it’s about something that was already ended
something that never stood a chance
at beginning
towards the end of the end
the end in terms of run-time
we see Mo-Wan whispering something into a hole in a wall
it’s inaudible
but not silent
we are denied this speech
loss too
gets interpellated as a gesture that is inaudible
but not silent
loss is held in our palms
cupped around our mouths
& it’s even on the backs of our hands
covering our
eyes
teeth
feeling
[for] something out of physical reach
loss is brought on
beaten back
preserved
calcified
by words
loss haunts
every word we speak
what would Mo-Wan & Li-Zhen lose if they told someone else
how would that even go
what is there even to tell
all this is to say that there is a place for me
a physical place
where I can go
& if I looked out the window now
years later
my heart would still drop
I would
see someone
[who may or ]
there
looking back at me
with the same expression I’m wearing
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LYRIC ESSAY
"Life is a Bicycle"
Life is like riding a bicycle. You have to keep moving, or you fall off. It’s not always easy, but you have to keep pedaling and pushing forward.
Sometimes you have to climb hills that seem impossible to conquer. You strain and sweat, and your lungs burn with the effort. But then you reach the top, and you feel the rush of wind in your hair and the exhilaration of accomplishing something you weren’t sure you could do.
Other times, you coast along on flat ground, feeling the sun on your face and the smoothness of the road beneath your wheels. Your muscles relax, and you enjoy the simplicity of just being.
But then there are the downhill stretches. You pick up speed, and the wind whips past you, and you feel the rush of freedom and abandon. You can’t help but smile and laugh and let go of everything but the present moment.
Life is like that. It’s a mixture of ups and downs, struggles and triumphs, moments of peace and moments of excitement. Each hill, each turn, each change in terrain presents a new challenge and a new opportunity to grow.
The key is to keep pedaling. To keep moving, no matter how hard it gets or how easy it is. To embrace the journey and the process, and to find joy in the ride.
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"In a meaningless existence, find your own meaning. In a lack of order, invent it."
I wrote a little lyric essay thing! Put it up on Gumroad because I wanna' try keeping all my writing in one place, but it's available for free. Please give it a read if you're in the mood for it :3
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Where did they go, all the gods and the beasts? The jackals and winged horses, sphinxes and fish, all those creatures that weighed our organs in the afterlife, fed on years ill-lived? What do they tow now, those creatures that carried the sun and the stars, drew the moon to its place in the firmament each night? In those hours, I consider whether this world is really lined in shadow–thin veiled between spheres. Whether, our bodies plunge, drag against, and fray the weave, a kind of night that bleeds–dense, resinous, vast beyond means. Maybe, it is in these moments when we almost cross over, when we believe we see the other side, that we blur the boundary between the living and the dead, that we bring a supernatural darkness back with us through the gauze.
from Voice of the Fish, Lars Horn
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Road to Branson
I’ll never forget the Road to Branson.
We took it in the Bus. The bright green bus that my stepfather had bought. The bright green bus with the buckets and the hoses and the shower curtain rooms. The horrible forty foot cage that we lived in. The bus with me and him and my mother and my siblings and our cats and our dogs and our turtle. All eleven of us in a snot green bus on the Road to Branson.
I’ll never forget the hills. I’ll never forget the belly aching climbs up nearly vertical inclines and the fear that we’d fall on our back. I’ll never forget the swooping of the buzzards in my gut as we descended from the tops of them. I’ll never forget the way my mother’s rocking chair bobbled and shook and slid. I’ll never forget the roaring of the engine as my stepfather forced the poor Snot Rocket to do the impossible on the Road to Brason.
Up and down and Up and down, swerving around tight corners. From the windows on the side, peeking behind the hand stitched curtains clumsily hung, I remember seeing down the side of a drop. I remember vividly imagining going over the side and dying. Dying in a horrible, fiery death from within the snot green bus with our cats and our dogs and our turtle on the Road to Branson.
I remember the rock walls and the undressed Christmas trees that sat atop them. The thick and colorful lines that God had drawn in crayon across the sides that rose above the road below. The oranges and the reds and the grays and the browns. I remember it, because it was something other than the sprawling nothingness of the rest of the Midwest. The bubbles in my ears were a constant reminder that I was in an unfamiliar place. The rising and falling on the Road to Brason.
We went and left and came again, over and over and over. It’s right in the middle, in the middle of the churches we worked at in New York and California. In the middle of Florida and Washington. In the middle of the great emptiness that is the Midwest. When I close my eyes, I can see it perfectly. The drop offs and the tight corners and the looming walls and the freezing cold frosting breaths of a midwestern winter without heating and our turtle paddling gently along the rocky path from his perch atop the four foot speaker that my stepfather absolutely had to have on the Road to Branson.
The boiling cauldron of excitement that brewed inside my chest bubbled over with the addition of that one cheese factory we’d always visit. I’d know we were close when the forest of billboards arose from the horizon, broadcasting shows and caves and rides. Passing the ocean of trees that stretched out further than the sky, imagining the entire thing swallowing me whole. The ziplines and the towers and that one random roller coaster, beckoning us closer with smiling frozen faces.
Frozen faces keeping eternal watch over the Road to Branson.
#short story#cnf#essay#essay writing#writers on tumblr#writer things#branson missouri#lyric essay#lyricism#LGBTQA#creative nonfiction#writerscorner#am i ace
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Maggie Nelson, from Bluets
[Text ID: “Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”]
#maggie nelson#sadness#excerpts#writings#literature#prose poetry#lyric essay#fragments#selections#words#quotes#lit#typography#american literature
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Final day to register for my private Zoom-based winter writing workshops!
Final day to register! Join a great group of writers and put a little fire under your writing as those winter winds howl!
Come aboard for my winter Zoom-based private writing workshops: In the Landscape of Contemporary Poetry (Wednesdays) and Introduction to the Lyric Essay (Thursdays). Both classes take place from 6-8 PM Eastern Time and run for 6 weeks.
Registration closes at the end of day Sunday January 28 and classes begin later that week.
Details & registration available at my website
https://christophercitro.com/private-classes/
#christopher citro#poets on tumblr#writers on tumblr#citro#poetry#essay#poets#essayists#lyric essay#poetry class#creative nonfiction class#writing workshop#online writing workshop#poet#poem#introduction to the lyric essay#in the landscape of contemporary poetry#writing#writers#creative writing
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My Love Is Pain
Growing up and learning about love was the most convoluted part of my life. The love I experienced and developed myself was only disguised as pain. My mother would scold me yet hug me when I wanted to die. I was comforted for being in the wrong, but never corrected or held accountable. I was neglected and given up on when I failed to learn something new after the first few attempts. My father, silently supported by him, yet the love felt distant. So distant you barely felt it. It was like a cold chill really. The household itself only held onto anger and called it love by the end of the day. Violence and tears flooding the place with toxicity was called a home. The books I read described love to be as beautiful as a sunny day on the beach. Smiles and laughter sounded as fulfilling as laying down outside on a warm fall evening, watching the sunset go down with the one you cared for. I shrugged it off and only thought of that love as a fairytale. After all, it was never experienced in this home so, how could that ever be love?
Sitting here as an adult now, the love I continue to read in these books is still a difficult thing for me to experience. Someone expresses their warmth to me and I only meet them with an icy chill. I crave love so sweet it'll churn your stomach and make you gag. The thought of feeling that way grows butterflies in my stomach but is quickly dissolved by a painful ice storm. The deep love I feel for the man who loved me only gets locked away and labeled as shame. The affection I desperately want to give, instantly shunned by my constant thoughts of guilt and intrusive thoughts filling me with fear of rejection. I scared the only thing that meant everything to me away by expressing the only love I knew. That was when I realized this isn't love at all. Just pain in disguise.
"What's holding you back?" I lay down on the couch in my therapist's office. Remembering all those childhood events had given me a headache. Recalling how painful my love had been brings guilt back to the forefront of my mind. "Happiness," I tell her, was rarely something I felt and remembered often while I was growing up. It felt like new territory, and new experiences were often terrifying to me. Why couldn't I just express my love like the characters in the books do? Why does the thought of expressing such warmth cause anxiety to shoot up and shut me down? She goes on to answer my questions with careful thought. One at a time. It slowly comes together, piece by piece. The answer to my why. The explanation that my painful love can be altered, changed into what I seek instead. "If they really love you, they won't reject your attempts to show them your true, warm love that's been begging to jump out at any opportune moment. They'll encourage it and understand that you're trying to change for the better. I think you're ready to change this feeling and I want to thank you for opening up about it with me. That alone was a big, hard step for you and I appreciate it. Next time, we'll practice more on getting those warm feelings out naturally."
I reflect on what she said to me while I head home. A piece of me already starting to feel healed. My heart already feeling warmed and determined. I'll be scared and it'll be baby steps, but someday I'll be able to love how they do in the books without shutting down and shooting my love back with pain.
Just as I was going to say, "fuck it," and give up on this assignment, I put pen to my paper and couldn't put it down. This lyric essay I have attempted has been a weight lifted off my shoulders. Tears were shed and my smile returned. I'm happy I didn't give up because I'm honestly proud of how this came out. Hope whoever reads this enjoyed it as well. I appreciate and thank anyone who does.
#lyric essay#mine#my writing#writing#writer#writing community#love#love is pain#long post#long reads#poetic#poem#poetry#poets on tumblr#original poem#writers and poets#writers#writers on tumblr#writerscommunity#writeblr#reading#creative writing#healing#healingjourney#mentalhealth#poetry blog#poets#poet#feelings#poems and poetry
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Black River Chapbook Competition
The Black River Chapbook Competition is a semi-annual prize from Black Lawrence Press for a chapbook of poems or prose (including fiction, creative non-fiction, lyric essay, and prose hybrid manuscripts). Entries should be between 16 and 36 pages in length. The winner will receive $500 and publication.
Submissions are accepted via Submittable now through October 31.
We look forward to reading your work!
For more info and guidelines: https://www.blacklawrence.com/submissions-and-contests/the-black-river-chapbook-competition/
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Missing You
There was a while there when I was all yours. I remember what it felt like to be loved by you. It brings me to tears. Not inconsolable tears, but my eyes are wet. Wet with your memories. I see them in the fog.
Most days are clear. But I can’t help but stumble every now and then. I had a dream about you last night, and now you’re on my mind. I guess you always were. I must have pushed it down far…
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#breakup#dreams#ex#Excerpt#identity#love#lyric essay#memories#moving on#new orleans#Nonfiction#past self#philosophy#poem#poetry#reality#relationships#tears#thoughts
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"I Am A Rock"
By: Simon and Garfunkel
A winter's day In a deep and dark December; I am alone, Gazing from my window to the streets below On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow. I am a rock, I am an island.
I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty, That none may penetrate. I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain. It's laughter and it's loving I disdain. I am a rock, I am an island.
Don't talk of love, Well, I've heard the word before. It's sleeping in my memory. I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died. If I never loved I never would have cried. I am a rock, I am an island.
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me; I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb. I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock, I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.
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