Who’s Up Thinking About After The Threesome They Both Take You Home By Sue Hyon Bae I’m Thinking

#192

It's just one of those days

All things look the same

But nothing feels quite safe.

I'm scrounging for a sense of security.

So I'll wear a friends old t-shirt

And strum until my fingers hurt

And wash until my brain just works.

Little things are the start to stability.

i have a soft secret wish that conspires against me in the sleepy hours of late afternoon when my big dog sighs into my shoulder and nuzzles under my arm while we both procrastinate his walk a little longer just until we are done being on the couch together, curled up

i need to believe that if he could choose, he would stay looped indelicately, his legs a cascade in the air rolling his back on the only floor i can afford him instead of the romantic impossible wild

there are moments where his ears perk up at a rabbit and he watches their white tail tuck into a bush, like a wink. i don't know what dogs dream about but i hope to god

if he is dreaming about being a wolf he is not disappointed when he wakes up to blunted teeth

- Silas Denver Melvin @sweatermuppet, Grit Poetry Collection

When I was in middle school, I tried to learn how to crochet. I knew how to knit already, so I figured ‘how hard could it be’ and used my Christmas money on a brand new set of aluminum hooks and a how-to book.

To say it was difficult was an understatement. I spent hours pouring over my book, begging to gain some inkling of understanding from what felt like incomprehensible runes. My reward? One lopsided trapezoid of lumpy fabric and a resolve to never pick up a crochet hook again.

And so life went on, I finished middle school and high school without giving crochet so much as a second glance. In college, I read about how crochet couldn’t be replicated by a machine, it was unique in a way that knitting and many other fiber arts weren’t.

For Christmas last year, my girlfriend gave me what I now consider to be my most prized possession: a crocheted plush of my favorite pokemon. I raved over her skills and, since she never learned how to knit, we decided to have a yarn date at some point and teach each other our respective skills.

We never did get around to that yarn date. She passed a few months after our declaration, leaving me to inherit what was left of her yarn.

Nearly a decade after my initial attempt, I got ready for the toughest battle of my life. My weapons? One skein of yarn, a YouTube video, and a crochet hook that I had somehow never gotten rid of.

I slowly made my way through the video, redoing my work a couple times until I was satisfied with my product: a small, slightly misshapen rectangle.

I looked at my pristinely-made pokemon plush with hope for the first time in months and thought to myself, ‘maybe crocheting isn’t the hardest thing in the world, maybe you were just 12.’

Maybe this isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Maybe I’m just 21.

Bottlecap Press

poems i shouldn't have written, by amelia nason

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. interwoven with fact & fiction, poems i shouldn’t have written chronicles young lov

From amelia nason's chapbook, poems i shouldn't have written, available from Bottlecap Press!

What's that poem about the cockroach and the moth where the cockroach is like "I wish I've ever wanted anything the way that moth wanted to burn itself up in that lantern" because we had to read that in high school and it still fucks me up to this day

To The Person I Returned The Expensive Shirt To - Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is now available to pre-order! Get it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

I love pop rocks, can I have some more [x]

My Missing Wedding Ring Finger – A bittersweet comic about queer identity as exorcism.

cw: implied violence, comphet.