i talk about tearing flesh from an arm with my teeth and you stare at me in horror like you haven't tasted blood before. i talk about being crushed like a small animal on a fast lane and you ask me how it's humanly possible of me to cling to the stone of the sidewalk the way i do. my mother could skin her hands at the sink and it would still not rid her from the truth that is that she has fed me her body and that she is convict to the manslaughter of her child.
quick question: how does one write about their mother without mentioning their mother? mine is a fortune teller. she tells me in the dead of the night while i am on the kitchen floor with the boning knife in one hand and and a towel in the other that i will never be loved right. that i will never find real love. that i will always suffer if i look for it.
mother knows best.
she tells me she destroyed herself for me and that i am selfish and cruel for not destroying myself for her. she begs me to be beautiful. she begs me to be the daughter she wanted to have. my friend tells me on the swing on a beautiful springtime evening that i am selfish and cruel for devouring every little piece of every damn thing that has ever tasted like love to me. and when i go home in the evening, my mother looks at me like she did the night she told me she wishes she'd killed me when i was a child. i tell everyone i am starving. my mother tells me she told me so.
i stare at the red in the ball of spit i hawked onto the bathroom floor. i retouch the scars on my thighs. i hack away at my hair with the big crafting scissors. i pray to god that i will wake up tomorrow beautiful and loveable. i wake up the same way. my mother tells me to never come back when i step out to leave for work. i tell her i am trying my best but nothing is working. she tells me she told me so. she tells me she's glad to see me in pain because i deserve it.
maybe i do deserve it.
i visit a clothing store and step into the fitting room just to see the way i am reflected back and forth in the front-and-back mirrors. i look and i see a morbid, mangled ruin the greatest what-could-have-been of all time. and by that i mean, i see a million possibilities in one. all the girls i could have been. and at the very center, where the image gets so small it's blurry and barely visible maybe i am beautiful. maybe i am loveable. maybe i find real love and maybe i don't suffer for it.
maybe i am the daughter my mother wanted.
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right person, wrong time (variations on heartbreak)
@leemartenspoetry on tumblr
vita sackville-west & fegan’s 1924 café in dublin
everything everywhere all at once (2022)
@heavensghost on tumblr
i had to get out by indigo de souza
‘calling a wolf a wolf' by kaveh akbar
river by joni mitchell
‘english song’ in a little larger than the entire universe: selected poems by fernando pessoa
slumber by ron hicks
fish in exile by vi khi nao
penitent magdalene by antonio ciseri
@ojibwa on tumblr
this is what the drugs are for by gracie abrams & the awakening by angelo morbelli
as good as it gets by fizz
lonely this christmas by mud & picture of the christmas tree at trinity college dublin, taken by me in december of 2022
this is what the drugs are for by gracie abrams & picture by andrew collins via globalnews.ca
@inanotherunivrs on tumblr & a polaroid of me taken by my ex-boyfriend
‘in a dream you saw a way to survive’ by clementine von radics & a picture of my ex-boyfriend's window, taken by me
bluets by maggie nelson & the poolbeg generating station, dublin
‘unrequited’ by sasha m george & inheritance by matthew w. cornell
[unknown]
@ faraway on instagram & lavender sprigs farm cut by linda jacobus
the museum of heartbreak by meg leder
[unknown]
‘seaside improvisation’ by richard siken
@ dracarysgang on twitter
@-love-letters-i-never-sent
@fromdarzaitoleeza on tumblr
explosions by ellie goulding
‘i had a dream about you’ by richard siken
the beatrice letters by lemony snicket
la la land (2016)
‘catalog of unabashed gratitude’ by ross gay
@stuckinapril on tumblr
@deathlywounded on tumblr
some are always hungry by jihyun yun
‘speaking practice’ by franny choi
a self-portrait in letters by anna sexton & a picture of my ex-boyfriend in a lake in Orfű, Hungary
@sunsbleeding on tumblr
‘there is no absolution for the fallen, only the dying’ by p.d
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