drew over something i wrote for a class and liked :] sorry the cars are lowkey ugly, its because I fucking hate cars and cant be bothered to learn what they look like beyond ominous hunks of metal
edit: transcript of the poem by itself under the cut
6 Tips for Crossing the Road
Look both ways
The road is for cars.
Make sure to look for them before crossing. Even when you have the right of way, cars have a lot of safety features and you have none.
Use designated crosswalks
The road is for cars.
So is the crosswalk but, under brief and temporary conditions, you can use it too! Never jaywalk, never walk in the road, just hope there is a clear and functional sidewalk.
Cross at the light
The road is for cars.
There are rules and signs for them, but that can only go so far. Walk quickly and hold your breath and hope that the light doesn't turn. Make eye contact with drivers as their cars teem with potential energy, rumbling with disdain at the inconvenience of your crossing. Try to ignore the cloud of exhaust that you are in and they are above.
Leash your pets
The road is for cars.
Obviously.
To you, it may be natural to sacrifice so much space to them but to your dog, it is not. His instinct is to explore freely. You must curb it. Modern US car models have such high hoods that the average child, let alone dog, is obscured. Even on the sidewalk, hold the leash tight because the sidewalk (if you are so blessed) is next to the street and the threat still looms.
Look out for road kill
The road is for cars.
And no one was there to leash the deer.
Or the raccoon.
Or the cat.
Did you know that the most reliable sample method for wildlife in an area is looking at the roadkill?
Remember these tips
The road is for cars.
Cars are everywhere. In the city. In the suburbs. In the country. In the woods (the US Forest Service manages more roads than the entire Ministry of Transit in China.) Cars are everywhere because there are roads to bring them there, which is great if you are a car and want to get from place to place fast without worrying about the in-between.
Unfortunately, you are not a car.
You are an animal.
You are in-between.
So remember to look both ways.
Burning Your Boats The Collected Short Stories, Black Venus, Angela Carter / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / Unknown / Tell Me No Secrets, Joy Fielding / Stop the World and Get Off, Peggy Toney Horton / Grief, Barbera Crooker / Unknown / A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf / Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery / William Stanley Merwin / Maurice, E. M. Forster / Dear Would be Wife, Gala Mukomolova / Unknown / Anne of Avonlea, L.M. Montgomery / Anvita Bhogadi / Peace Like a River, Leif Enger / Unknown / Unknown / The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare / @honeytuesdy / October, Robert Frost / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot / Georgia Grace / Alexander Smith / Unknown / Insta: sarahkjp
Normal is a memory, but time moves so slow, so much like it always has, that no one notices.
No one notices that we don't talk about jam anymore, or how beautiful your dress is.
Because have you seen the news? There are war crimes, beloved.
Your dress? The price of weeks of food thirty years ago
And it tastes like small hands working sowing machines.
The jam? No one has time for home mades anymore, my dear. There are tears to be swallowed.
I wonder if there ever was a normalcy, with Sunday brunches and sadness, not depression. Or if it was always a memory.
Always just a few generations out of our reach.
See, I was wrong.
We do notice.
"It doesn't have to be like this. We could have it so much better"
Calligraffiti in Chicago, Illinois
I made a list. It's incomplete. Working title:
- ww3 memes
- organising climate crisis protests at 14
- Not knowing the "before". Before the housing crisis. Before 9/11. Before Reagan laws. Before debt.
- no going out. No dates in cute restaurants. Do I look freaking rich.
- Amazon or Nestle owning everything you have ever had
- America just.... I'll just say America.
- Being 5th grade when Trump came into office
- No being able to turn off the ads. The manipulation. Ever. The deep psychology approach to making me despise myself since I learnt to decode information
- constant exposure to violence and suffering numbing us until we're called ignorant and heartless for not reacting
- social media algorithms specifically designed to crush and turn me into an addict. Since before I got my period.
- no more girlhood. You know how to pull an eyeliner and perfectly curl your hair in 7th grade or you die.
- no public spaces. There's Sephora, there are some chain restaurant. And if you feel like feeling a drop of relief you buy a Starbucks.
- Cyber. Bullying. Being on your own. Your parents have no goddamm clue.
Where's My Fucking Teenage Dream but it's real. Where's my fluffy 90s hair, my glitter hair combs, my shopping-as-a-hobby, my milkshakes, my prom? Where's my "my favourite colour is yellow?" Yellow like Butter Flowers, not like toxic waste. Can we talk about growing up in the years before a global system snaps? I was 7 when I read a picture book about Anne Frank. Who knew the early knowledge of how to spell 'death' would be so handy.
weird unprompted opinion but i think out of all the storytelling mediums.....theatre best portrays loneliness
working on a zine about the intersections of fatness, gender, and growing up online. it's a long time coming and i'm still not sure where it'll take me.
We're teenage girls, me and my friends. In every sense of the word.
We've got one who loves k-dramas, Tom Holland and makes great almond cake, we've got a tiny one who's sarcasm mutes me every time (to her great delight) and loves anime, we've got one who's the light and laughter of any party, who's soft safety and recently was diagnosed with depression, and we've got a childish and dreaming one who's beautiful, stunning. Everyone tells her. It frightens her.
I haven't seen my friends in a while.
No one's fault, just life. School, tests, a pandemic. So imagine my happiness! Our excitement! When a friend's friend invited us to a party, and we found time to meet up beforehand, to talk! Laugh! Eat pizza!
My friends came. And we laughed. I told them I've never been to a party, that I was pretty nervous. Soft And Safe grinned at me, told me it was fine, the boys that invited us were nice. And guess what? She had kissed one of them!! A drunken make-out, wasn't that cool??!
Then she stopped. Her smile slipped a little
Well, not that cool. She started, sitting there beside my bed.
Not all of it.
And sentence for sentence, Soft And Safe, who I grew up with, who I'd known like the other girls since I was ten, new in town and was adopted into their little group, hesitantly told me a story I'll never forget. Because it taught me life.
Because the boy she made out with was nice.
Until he asked her to kiss him on the cheek for a picture and she felt too uncomfortable and drunk to say no.
Until, when they were kissing alone in a room, he kept trying to put his hand under her shirt, even when she pushed it away.
Until he pulled her onto his lap, crotch pushed uncomfortably against her jeans, and held her waist down.
Until he barked at the girl checking up on Soft And Safe to get out.
Until he put his hand into her pants, and answered "everything is fine, relax", when she told him she didn't like that.
Until he pushed her over the sink.
Until, when she said she didn't want that and that they should go back downstairs, he got back claps and fist bumps from the other boys.
She got her best friend, whom she had rejected a week earlier, call her a slut. He said he could never see her the same way again.
We thought it wouldn't happen to us. But as we sat there in my room, staring at her forced smile, eyes frantic, we realised how she had done everything right.
And it had still happened.
It had happened to me three weeks earlier, at my gym.
And we realised
It wouldn't stop. We wouldn't grow out of it.
Being a woman would be a war we hadn't signed up for.
We went to the party. I saw him. I didn't deck him like I had planned. Because everyone would think I'm the one out of line.
fuck the tits or ass debate, i find eyebags sooo attractive. your exhausted, sleep-deprived, mildly haunted aura has bewitched me body and soul
GUYS!!!
FRANCE HAS REACHED THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF SIGNATURES ON THE CITIZEN'S INITIATIVE AGAINST CONVERSION THERAPY IN THE EU!!
ONE COUNTRY DOWN, SIX TO GO!!
We also need still quite a few signatures in order to reach the one million required.
As to date, the six other countries with the most signatures are:
Spain - 38.72%
Finland - 30.31%
Ireland - 24.86%
Netherlands - 24.15%
Germany - 23.54%
Belgium - 23.09%
So yeah, still a long way to go, but we ARE slowly getting closer. Don't stop now! Don't let this stay within the community, either, if you have any friends or family who are open to queer rights, get them to sign, too!
This poem by Alice Miller healed something in me
(She/her) Hullo! I post poetry. Sometimes. sometimes I just break bottles and suddenly there are letters @antagonistic-sunsetgirl for non-poetry
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