I Have To Remember How Much It Hurt. I Can't Make That Same Mistake Again.

“Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day. Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember. In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map, Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on. Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves. Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out, saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom. Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is, the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle the school-turned-prison where only seven escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried. How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell? The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper. Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well of her childhood home, and how her mother told her don’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.”

— “Loose Strife,” by Quan Barry

Miller's Girl (2024)

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) dir. Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

Stutz (2022)

“Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get - a cold, sick feeling deep down inside - when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the person you were.”

— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light

“I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl, a cry.” 

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

on loneliness

Amy Dunne // Nickie Zimov // Carol Lee, To Die For // Marie Alsing // Anne Sexton, A Self Portrait in Letters // As Tears Go By (1988) dir. Wong Kar Wai // Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his wife Anna Dostoevsky, 28 August 1879 // Aron Wiesenfeld // Margaret Atwood, from “Thoughts From Underground”

Cue It’s OK If You Forget Me by Astrid S 🤍

this anime wrecked my soul.

i miss gin, so fucking much.

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Tell Me Something Good, Ocean Vuong

“If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories aren’t finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.”

— Jamie Tworkowski