projectiondepartment:

2 of my new poems out today in brawl lit :) i’m really proud of these!

(via projectiondepartment)

firstfullmoon:

ALT

Maria Gray, “[Years of pelvic floor therapy]”

(via saintmelangell)

eileenlufkin:

letterful:

— WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak.

[id

Wisława Szymborska



“Could Have”

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck — there was a forest.
You were in luck — there were no trees.
You were in luck — a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant …

So you’re here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn’t be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.


[Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh] end id]

(via intactics)

seashel1:

The History of Loneliness

Until a century or so ago, almost no one lived alone; now many endure shutdowns and lockdowns on their own. How did modern life get so lonel

The New Yorker

what an article. here are some of the parts that stuck out to me most:

(via maryolive)

kummatty:

The gelatin in film stock was made from the hide, bones, cartilage, ligaments, and connective tissue of calves (considered the very best), sheep (less desirable), and other animals who passed through the slaughterhouse. Six kilograms of bone went into a single kilogram of gelatin. Eventually, the demands of photographic industries generated so much need for animal byproducts that slaughterhouses became integrated into the photographic production chain. Controlling the supply chain became key to Kodak’s success. In 1882, as Kodak began to grow as a company, widespread complaints of fogged and darkened plates stopped production. The crisis almost ruined Kodak financially and resulted in the company tightly monitoring the animal by-products used in gelatin. Decades later, a Kodak emulsion scientist discovered that cattle who consumed mustard seed metabolized a sulfuric substance, enhancing the light sensitivity of silver halides and enabling better film speeds. The poor-quality gelatin in 1882 was due to the lack of mustard seeds in the cows’ diet. The head of research at Kodak, Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees, concluded, “If cows didn’t like mustard there wouldn’t be any movies at all.” By controlling the diet of cows who were used to make gelatin, Kodak ensured the quality of its film stock. As literary scholar Nicole Shukin reflects, there is a “transfer of life from animal body to technological media.” The image comes alive through animal death, carried along by the work of ranchers, meatpackers, and Kodak production workers.

—Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

(via pilgrimattinkercreek1974)

reallyreallyreallytrying:

ALT

ALT

CHLOE, 21 FROM STOCKPORT on Substack

candiedspit:

safari (first poem of the year)

(via candiedspit)

dostoyevsky-official:

Every morning, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s day.

That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit. You end up seriously thinking that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning; you make resolutions, and you regret your irresolution, and so on, and so forth. This is generally what’s wrong with dates.

They say that chronology is the backbone of history. Fine. But we also need to accept that there are four or five fundamental dates that every good person keeps lodged in their brain, which have played bad tricks on history. They too are New Years’. The New Year’s of Roman history, or of the Middle Ages, or of the modern age.

And they have become so invasive and fossilising that we sometimes catch ourselves thinking that life in Italy began in 752, and that 1490 or 1492 are like mountains that humanity vaulted over, suddenly finding itself in a new world, coming into a new life. So the date becomes an obstacle, a parapet that stops us from seeing that history continues to unfold along the same fundamental unchanging line, without abrupt stops, like when at the cinema the film rips and there is an interval of dazzling light.

That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigour.

No spiritual time-serving. I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed. No day of celebration with its mandatory collective rhythms, to share with all the strangers I don’t care about. Because our grandfathers’ grandfathers, and so on, celebrated, we too should feel the urge to celebrate. That is nauseating.

I await socialism for this reason too. Because it will hurl into the trash all of these dates which have no resonance in our spirit and, if it creates others, they will at least be our own, and not the ones we have to accept without reservations from our silly ancestors.

Gramsci, 1 January 1916, transl. Alberto Toscano