Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

May Sarton, from Journal of a Solitude

[Text ID: Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass.

Let it go.]

Finally finished my Hidden Figures print! Another one you can find at ECCC! Which I need to remember to make a map of my location lol

there are whole worlds between 'friend' and 'lover' that we don't talk about, or even have names for... there are levels of love we need to stop ignoring

So my family has a Gay Pirate Plate.

Stay with me.

We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.

I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.

It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.

(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)

Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.

My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.

When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.

We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.

Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.

The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.

I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.

Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”

Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.

But he’s trying to get me and my sister out to visit him. And plate mounts are cheap.

from abell 2218 by eric gamalinda, published in amigo warfare: poems

[Text ID: I use my body to find love. I eat all the wrong foods. I believe what I see with my own two eyes. Fear eats me. I have to look for a job. I can sprint faster than sound. I burn forever, I have no end. /End ID]

[ first contact, communion from everyone on the moon is essential personnel ] by julian k. jarboe

Ada Limon said,  “I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one even.” and “I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.” and  Anis Mojgani said, “Will I be something? Am I something? and the answer comes: You already are. You always were. And you still have time to be.”

this is how i used to serve appetizers to customers

Prelude, Brynne Rebele-Henry

"I could make that abstract art, anyone could" then make it. Unironically. Go buy some paints. Do a mild googling. Do it, make the same art. See what it feels like. Find out what it inspires in you. Back in high school one kid was pretty disparaging of Jackson Pollock's art until we MADE Jackson Pollocks and it became his THING for the rest of the year. You could go into the art room on break to find him picking out colors and preparing space to make em. Try on the abstract art and let yourself forge a genuine connection to it, coward.