Audrey Ying, “gravity”
I owe it to her.
A promise to look at my past selves
through a window of love &
not from a closed door.
And just like that, a meteor rips
out of the sternum of the sky.
It doesn’t beg
to be saved. I think of how
I am no longer ashamed
to be like it —
lying open and
vulnerable,
falling before the world
in fire & dawn smoke.
I love; therefore I
am ruthlessly holding you
up to the wrong light.
Audrey Ying, “Blindsided, 2020”
You don’t know what it’s like to die yet.
You’re fearless. Courage larger than any cathedral.
The world is a bouquet clenched in your fists. The sky bows into sunrise & the ocean draws out to desert before your calloused feet. Here, the rain pours like chant praising your name.
You who crawled out of the mouth you once loved: bloodied but breathing.
Audrey Ying, from “oxygen hymn”
Yellow love is sleight of hand:
a bookmark slipped between page 236 and 237
when the conductor asks you which stop is
yours but then whispers, “you’re okay” and punches
the ticket he pulls out from his sleeve.
It’s the meeting of pu-erh tea eyes
on the B line on the New York City subway & a head nod
that says “we share the same dragon blood.”
It’s remembering how many times you’ve
passed by a hair salon wanting to dye your hair
yet you never will because it’s not just yours —
it’s theirs too.
Yellow love is meeting a language that
looks like glass breaking and cutlery ringing
yet being asked how to recite such poetry.
Audrey Ying, “Yellow Love” (after “Brown Love”)
Didn’t you hear?
The town gossip has it that you were born in a waiting room. That your bark is only sorry and silence. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll put a muzzle over your wild anyway.
Because safe is always better than sorry and no one likes
a girl with teeth. But no one puts a cage around what they don’t fear.
Audrey Ying, “A Wild Becoming”
I swear not to cave in
and then I faint becoming the moon
going through all its phases at once.
& I say to me: this is what it is to be a girl
woman. to be waxing and waning
and always coming back up full.
astagesetforcatastrophe, speaking of new moons
this year, you are a different kind of girl.
you preserve your hurt in a honey jar just to see how much you’ve grown. and hey, sometimes comparisons are a good reminder of what it looks like to move forward. & here, there is no need for confessions for being a seeing-is-believing type of person. this is no church & making it this far is enough of a religion for you.
this year, you shake out all the rugs in your house and wash your hair twice until it lathers in blooms like your barber told you. but that’s as far as rules go.
for the rest of the time, you grip the reins with your teeth because you're in the middle of writing a to-do list you’re only going to half follow. it doesn’t mean you won’t learn how to eat a pomegranate right or how to hem your favourite pair of pants. you'll find a way to improvise and find out you're good as hell at it too.
remember last year? last year, you went as far as making a pact with yourself to not look back. but back then you didn't know that that was those kind of promises. the kind that mimics leaving a ceramic flower pot on the edge of the top step of your front porch in the middle of a big storm. it taught you a good lesson though, so maybe it was worth it.
but this year, you are a different girl. by now, you're a little closer to figuring that life is more like a conveyor belt or the moving walkway in airports than whatever someone else said. meaning: you can look back as long as you don't go back.
so yes, restart. or reset. this is a crying year, a laughing year, a growing year. this is another year to grant yourself a second chance - be it your first, fifteenth, twentieth, or even fiftieth. and i am here to wish you all the best.
astagesetforcatastrophe, a year’s resolutions
#burning muse#quotes#prose#prosetry#alt lit#spilled ink#spilled thoughts#creative writing#poets on tumblr#writers on tumblr#new poets society#poets corner#poem#poetry#quote#writing#2018 resolutions#resolutions#prose poetry#new year&039;s resolutions#new year's resolutions#haven't written in so long that this felt weird#i think my writing style has changed a bit#which is good#i'm also trying to avoid writing about love as much as possible#it's a good practice#also this came out in 15 minutes which is a surprise#HAH
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
yesterday, you throw up from hoarding
too many old photographs of yourself when
the world held you drowning.
your stomach still hurts ten months later.
in fact, it is a pomegranate gushing blood when it
learns that love has past tense. that a letter
tastes like a bullet.
it is no wonder you are scared of what is sacred.
astagesetforcatastrophe, pomegranate
#burning muse#alt lit#spilled ink#quotes#quotation#poetry#poems#poem#prose poetry#prose poem#spilled prose#prosecco#prosetry#rejectscorner#rejects poetry#rejects writing#writing#poets on tumblr#poetic#poetsofinstagram#love quotes#ink#spilled thoughts#spilled words#spilled poetry#spilled feelings#lit#excerpt from a book i'll never write#excerpt from a story i'll never write#repost
Our mothers taught us everything.
How to become every space we weren’t supposed
to take. How to make ourselves full on empty &
to swallow all the quiet until it became loud.
They came dressed in lion’s skin
& roaring, carrying us over one mountain
so we could bring them over ten.
So light the match:
there is no bringing us back to ash and dust.
We have become too good at burning.
astagesetforcatastrophe, inheritance
#burning muse#poetry#spilled ink#spilled thoughts#ink#quotes#words#poems#poem#prose#poets on tumblr#poetsofinstagram#poetic#poetsofig#new poets society#rejectscorner#rejects poetry#rejects writing#writing#poets corner#feminism#wo#mothers#an excerpt from a book i'll never write#excerpts from my writing#excerpt from a book I'll never write#excerpt from a story i'll never write
I loved you from bone to bone. From here to there, from always to always. So I don’t need to say where it hurts. Pain is its own wolf.
#quotes#burning muse#spilled ink#spilled thoughts#spilled words#spilled poetry#rejectscorner#rejects poetry#rejects writing#an excerpt from a book i'll never write#excerpt from a book I'll never write#excerpts from my writing#writing#ink#words#poems#poem#prose#love#poetry#poets on tumblr#poetic#poetsofinstagram#need to start writing actual poems again#sigh#need inspiration#):#boo
who are you to pry this heart open again?
who am i for not twisting your hands trying?
astagesetforcatastrophe, excerpt from Q&A
have you heard how she will betray you?
sharpen her teeth on goose feathers,
crow three times, and then call herself a grenade?
she’ll pull the safety lever when she hands
her heart over & let dust become caked by body
instead of the other way around
because from this distance,
even blood looks like smoke and ash;
even a flower is big enough to be a city burning.
so don’t tell her the faucet leaks anymore.
ask her: what will they do when the pipe bursts sky-wide
after it hears that she lived?
astagesetforcatastrophe, safety lever
#burning muse#spilled ink#spilled thoughts#words#poetry#spilled words#spilled poetry#spilled writing#writing#rejects poetry#rejectscorner#rejects writing#quotes#poems#poem#poets on tumblr#poetsofinstagram#lit#ink#alt lit#poetic#poesia#excerpt from a book i'll never write#excerpt from a story i'll never write#tw: depression#tw: eating problems#haven't written in a long time#:I#my words#prose poetry
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
A moon of yarn for the way back. A Minotaur’s head. A promise cut on sword.
Ariadne knows this tragedy well: how we give love its teeth. How we let it loose like daisy weed out on our lawns and then find our hands and knees lost deep crawling through the labyrinth of another body. In its tangled turns and dead ends, these rib-walls shake like ship new to sea. Our veins come undone like old knots, like butterflies pouring out of shell. And our heartbeats parade through fog like bullets instead of light rain.
When the deed is done, we are all white sails returning to wounds. Open and nothing like the love letters returned to sender in thousands. The blood wells the way love builds us from the sky up and then leaves us to burn in pyres made from sun.
For so long, they have called it glory when girl is abandoned. When girl is capsized in her own sorrow. But in another myth, Ariadne keeps the yarn.
In another myth, she is praised.
astagesetforcatastrophe, for ariadne (via astagesetforcatastrophe)
‘Come,’ I said to love. And it came
as wild bird with broken wing. So I held it:
let it dig trenches so deep, it found earth’s marrow.
& yes, I saved it. Saved it to watch it go.
astagesetforcatastrophe, so be it
#burning muse#spilled ink#spilled thoughts#poetry#quotes#words#love#spilled words#spilled feelings#spilled poetry#ink#alt lit#rejects poetry#rejectscorner#rejects writing#writing#excerpt from a book i'll never write#excerpt from a story i'll never write#poems#poem#short poem#oops#my hiatus though#o m g#but srsly writing is so difficult when you have no thoughts#& school tbh#lit
hands like yours means the end.
means you are performing open heart surgery
on my whole damn sky.
& it is like us. mouth to mouth for air.
wanting. like us, blue.
astagesetforcatastrophe, 450 nanometers
#burning muse#spilled ink#quotes#poetry#alt lit#rejectscorner#rejects poetry#love#ink#spilled thoughts#spilled words#spilled poetry#spilled poem#poem#poems#rejects writing#writing#creative writing#uh#ok#haven't been around for awhile#want to write badly but can't????#struggles#help#):#inspire meeeeeee#writers#excerpt from a book i'll never write
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
It starts grey.
That is the light folding first.
Then us.
Up there, the roads are leaf veins.
This glorious wreck is rain boots out on the porch.
And I still go soft for you like oats in warm milk.
astagesetforcatastrophe, milk (via astagesetforcatastrophe)
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
You are blooming again.
Like morning paper laid over countertop.
Like wildfire. Like sky.
astagesetforcatastrophe, the new coping mechanism (via astagesetforcatastrophe)