mouthporn.net
#writing – @astagesetforcatastrophe on Tumblr
Avatar

a stage set for catastrophe

@astagesetforcatastrophe / astagesetforcatastrophe.tumblr.com

the whale & ever occasional poet who peels oranges in all the wrong way.
Avatar
Avatar
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.

Audrey Ying, “gravity

Avatar
Avatar
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”

Avatar
Avatar
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”)

Avatar
Avatar
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”

Avatar
Avatar
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 

Avatar
Avatar
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  

Avatar
Avatar
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.
Avatar
Avatar
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.
Avatar
Avatar
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?
Avatar
Avatar
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.
Avatar
Avatar
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.
You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
mouthporn.net