sinners | Lauren Aquilina

“loneliness is the anchor / you’ve always carried with you”

— Lisel Mueller, from “Voyager,” Second Language (via lifeinpoetry)

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass

[Text ID: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,”]

tenderness and destruction

[aka a wen kexing starter kit part 2 (part 1)]

Hieu Minh Nguyen // Raymond Carver, from Late Fragment // @Mothcub // Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry // Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous // Hozier, Sunlight // Hanif Abdurraqib, from “Board Up the Doors, Tear Down the Walls,” in A Little Devil in America

Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House

Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? / @/oceaii (tumblr) / Liv Ullmann Changing / The Elektra Complex / Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman from "Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry / unknown / @/violentcherries (tumblr) / @/nutnoce (tumblr) / Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea / unknown

i. Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? [ "This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot." ]

ii. @/oceaii (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a deer. The deer looks forwards in the first panel and turns back to face the audience in the second panel. "Turn and face / the person you've become." ]

iii. Liv Ullmann Changing [ "I will never forget the loneliness I knew as a child. For a period in my life I hid behind a mask. Did not want to acknowledge any longing. / Now it is a part of me-something I can share. / Both the loneliness and the longing." ]

iv. The Elektra Complex [ "If you were to peel the skin of me apart as a fig's, you would finally understand. I am my mother's daughter. From poisoned seeds sprout poisoned fruits." ]

v. Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman [ "I didn't want / to be the dead star / that uses borrowed light to survive." ]

vi. unknown [ Black and white illustration of two deer. They are both labeled with words. The deer in the background says "just be." The deer in the foreground replies "just being is the hardest part." ]

vii. @/violentcherries (tumblr) [ "the environment you are not thriving in is not yours forever / IT'S OKAY TO LEAVE / ... / IT'S OKAY to abandon the things you used to love" ]

viii. @/nutnoce (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a scorpion doing chores. It's tail just barely curls over the front of a clothes line. Various pairs of socks hang from the clothes line. It stands before a bucket with more clothes inside. "I come from the toughest, meanest place you can imagine. / I want to be gentle, I want to die gently, but / It seems that when life gets hard / I have to get harder to match." ]

ix. Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea [ "I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar." ]

x. unknown [ "1. Man is a MORAL animal. / 2. You can get human beings to do anything - IF you can convince them it is moral. / 3. You can convince human beings that anything is moral." ]

hollowness

sylvia plath // lydia roberts // juansen dison “i am the architect of my own destruction” // sarah dessen //ellen jackman//haruki murakami “sputnik sweetheart” // f. scott fitzgerald // miles johnson

wolves without teeth // of monsters and men

“i was a darkness in his bed sunless & shining like oil”

— – Safia Elhillo  (via pairedaeza)

adrienne rich, of women born: motherhood as experience and institution / alexandra levasseur - body of land collection, 2015 / ana teresa barboza - bordados collection, 2004 / margaret atwood, “europe on $5 a day” / tracey emin - it was all too much, 2018 / clarice lispector, a breath of life / gérard lartigue- femme bougie, 2018 / jenefer schute, life-size / louise bourgeois - i DISTANCE myself from myself, 2010 / wayne koestenbaum, “figure” / henrik uldalen - caries and surge, 2017 / andrés cerpa, “the vault” / jennifer’s body (2009) / enrico robusti- food, sex, & irony collection, 2014 / sylvia plath, the bell jar

i distance myself from myself

“I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof. […] Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?”

— Ada Limon, from “The Hurting Kind,” The Hurting Kind: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022)