The cliff’s edge, a salty drink; cerulean & white foam; home, love, & road all have four letters. Home, love, and road all have four letters & I tore me apart: limbs, cells, sinew; all held together by so little, a little blood, oil, & water. Every scrap of paper shredded, every thread unraveled. Living in the empty in-between is easy when you’re unsure of your own tepid existence. How can you tell someone the truth which is that you feel nothing & everything at once?; a whole cosmos made corporeal, flesh theater. Applause, applause! Exeunt all. There was a summer I became obsessed with fragmentation, fading into the woods of autumn where I discovered restoration & took a job selling bundles of violets by the old movie house on the corner of 9th & Vine. All the customers were wine-drunk & in love; not necessarily with each other but with the idea of love itself, the feeling of a mouth & a neck & decades-old spit on celluloid.
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I give everything away and it goes away, into the dusty air, onto the face of the water that goes away beyond our seeing. I give everything away that has been given to me: the voices of children under clouds, the men in the parks at the chess tables, the women entering and leaving bakeries. God who came here by rock, by tree, by bird. All things silent in my seeing. All things believable in their leaving. Everything I have I give away and it goes away.
If you drive past horses and don’t say horses you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane but don’t point it out. A rainbow, a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer! Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker and don’t shush everyone around you into silence. If you find an unbroken sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see a dorsal fun breaking the water. If you see the moon and don’t say oh my god look at the moon. If you smell smoke and don’t search for fire. If you feel yourself receding, receding, and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.
This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel by Jonathan Tropper
You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
You’re all bluster & melodrama Empire State of Eden’s Rejects, Mama You can still be a racist even though You voted for Obama (Twice)
And I take meds to be a little Less me in melancholia Debutante in repose, Rhinoplastied nose your dad Bought you in Santa Fe but
I had to keep my ugly And my secrets and my sighs tucked Like a melody on a dusty piano While you were in Reno Getting turnt & twisted on the boulevard of broken dreams
You told me in aught three my Songs were poorly written but I kept Sparring with my demons & writ My lonesomeness into dust & made myself free
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
There Should Be Flowers by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
There should be more to life than disruption and survival but there isn’t. There should be birds singing your name. There should be paintings the size of skyscrapers memorializing your body. There should be love for you in everything. There should be a billion women jumping at the same time to move the earth off its course. There should be parties to celebrate the end of this world. There should be flowers to welcome a new one.
I don’t want the people who love me to avoid the reality of my body. I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable with its size and shape, to tacitly endorse the idea that fat is shameful, to pretend that I’m something I’m not out of deference to a system that hates me. I don’t want to be gentled like I’m something wild and alarming. If I’m gonna be wild and alarming, I’ll do it on my terms.
Thank God for Lindy West. When I first read Sbrill, which in my opinion is one of those books we’ll look back on in twenty or thirty years as a seminal feminist text, it enlightened me to something I had never before considered—that I didn’t have to experience shame surrounding my identity as a fat person. Shrill taught me, or perhaps reinforced for me, the idea that shame is a cultural construct wielded as social currency by dominant groups to keep the outgroups marginalized and silent.
Shrill taught me, or perhaps reinforced for me, the idea that shame is a cultural construct wielded as social currency by dominant groups to keep the outgroups marginalized and silent.
I’ve had so many loved ones, so many friends and family members, shy away when the topic of conversation shifts to my body. Or worse, they say something like, “You’re not fat. You’re beautiful.” Ergo, I can never be beautiful and exist in a fat body. Meanwhile, I know they’re lying to my over 300-pound ass. I know it. They know I’m fat. I know I’m fat. We are both cognizant of the shared knowledge of my fatness. To pretend otherwise, to tacitly ignore the reality of my body, is an act of erasure. And it is unacceptable.
Ergo, I can never be beautiful and exist in a fat body. Meanwhile, I know they’re lying to my over 300-pound ass. I know it. They know I’m fat. I know I’m fat. We are both cognizant of the shared knowledge of my fatness. To pretend otherwise, to tacitly ignore the reality of my body, is an act of erasure. And it is unacceptable.
There’s also a nuance, just below the surface, subtextual, corrosive—that implies that I’m not like those other fat people, those disgusting people who shovel in food at buffets—I’m one of the good fat people who does everything right and just remains fat as a cruel act of God. It rains on the just and the unjust. Being fat, though, is neither a punishment nor an unfortunate act of God. It is not a consequence of poor choices or diet or any sort of ableist bullshit you’ll encounter on daytime television—that blesséd time of day when we degenerate fatties are vacuuming up potato chips with our hungry mouths and finishing everyone’s leftovers from the night before.
…I deserve—we all deserve—the unabashed and unadulterated truth of our bodies. Let us be celebrated or let us be damned. I will not accept a third option.
Fat just is. And I deserve—we all deserve—the unabashed and unadulterated truth of our bodies. Let us be celebrated or let us be damned. I will not accept a third option.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
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