cruel intentions

“

Once you get to know me, I’m not really that nice.

—Snejana Onopka

“

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

—“You Can’t Have It All,” Barbara Ras

“You didn’t love her. You just didn’t want to be alone. Or maybe, maybe she was good for your ego. Or maybe she made you feel better about your miserable life, but you didn’t love her, because you don’t destroy the person that you love.”

— Callie Torres, The Heart of the Matter’ (via fckrt)

shit

(Source: greys-anatomy-quotes)

Posted 1 month ago

“

You are a souvenir shop, where he goes
to remember how much people miss him
when he is gone.

—Sierra DeMulder, from “Unrequited Love Poem”

(Source: oofpoetry)

“

The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color.” and
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10” black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

—Audre Lorde “Power”

(Source: femignome)

“

I have buried you in every place I’ve been. You keep ending up in my shaking hands.

—Bon Iver

(Source: seabois)

loveyourchaos:

I don’t care if you love me, I don’t care if you ever loved me. I can do that on my own, what I want from you is to be missed. I want you to wake up and reach out for me and when you realize your bed is empty I want you to understand why.

uh huh

Posted 2 months ago

“‘Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.’

‘You’ll always be like this to me.’

‘Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.’ Her tears were falling. ‘I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.’”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

(Source: rabbitinthemoon)

Posted 2 months ago

“

I give myself five days to forget you.
on the first day I rust.
on the second I wilt.
on the third day I sit with friends but I think about your tongue.
I clean my room on the fourth day.
I clean my body on the fourth day.
I try to replace your scent on the fourth day.
the fifth day, I adorn myself like the mouth of an inmate /
I glow the way unwanted things do,
a neon sign that reads;
come, I still taste like someone else’s mouth.

—Warsan Shire

(Source: milktree)

veggielezzyfemmie:

Feminists Install Temporary Memorial to Rape Survivors on Washington Mall

by Sarah Mirk on February 15, 2013 - 10:34am

The National Mall got a new memorial yesterday, if only briefly. As part of One Billion Rising, Baltimore-based feminist group FORCE installed a temporary memorial recognizing survivors of sexual assault. The group greated giant letters out of a statement from a rape survivor and floated the eight-foot-tall words onto the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.