re: 2019

We may only look back to be sure we have not come this way before.

(This is the Groundhog Day of years.)

If you keep telling stories you can survive anything.

(You’re not special. Work harder.)

The closest you may ever get to another human being is sitting on a plane and that’s probably for the best.

(Carry Clorox wipes whenever you travel.)

You’ve done this alone before and this is no different; repeat that statement until it becomes true.

(You will need more boxes in more sizes than you think.)

Healing begins by scrubbing the floorboards of a house that doesn’t belong to you until your knuckles are raw and your lungs ache and every inch of laminate sparkles.

(You can survive anything— you’ll prove it when your best friend dies.)

The only cure for fear is anger.

 

 

charcoal before fire

Lover & Beloved

This weekend I rewatched the first two seasons of Hannibal and, wow, y’all, have I got a lot to  say about this show. For my regular readers: I’m not a Fannibal or Hannibal blogger™, I swear. I just have problems with impulse control when I encounter a piece of media with so many complex layers and an inherent queerness. Don’t expect fancy, or even basic editing, but do expect lots and lots of feelings about history, poetry, and love.

TL;DR: Buckle up nerds, Rae’s gonna talk about Renaissance Italian romantic tropes and Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. Spoiler alert: this is incredibly gay.

this again?

My mother’s husband’s brother dies and the news comes late at night. The brother he hated, if we’re being honest, they were never close.

But it doesn’t matter because the result is the same, because it could be anything– a scratched bumper, a crooked picture, a contrary opinion, an eye roll, a burnt meal– that sets him screaming and destructive, punching walls and breaking crockery and throwing himself downstairs and into plate glass, threatening lives and violence like breathing.

Part of me hopes that this will be what kills him.

Part of me knows better.

The part of me that remembers eighteen and shaking holding a door shut with my spine while he slammed his weight into it again and again and again until the shitty particle board groaned and cracked and he murmured to me through it like a seduction that he could get into my bedroom if he really wanted, that, of course, he had only ever given me what I had asked for, that I couldn’t keep him out forever with my bruised knuckles and aching back braced and burning against that broken door–

That part of me feels sick because it knows. Because he and I are monstrously alike. Nothing anyone or anything has done to him has killed him yet and I know in my bones that neither will this. He’ll survive and so will I and, eventually, the door will break.

professional self-saboteur

I don’t always distribute unfinished poetry about podcasts but when I do, it’s poetry about The Penumbra.

get skinny or die trying

Capitalism has found out about body positivity– I’m sure y’all’ve noticed:

Be-you-tiful.

A body for everybody.

Choose beautiful.

#Lose hate not weight.

It’s everywhere. Self-love and a healthy relationship with food are only one purchase away!

You think these things sound familiar. You think it might be nice to fall for it. You think these people are goddamn fools if they think I’m going to even consider loving a thing that has been trying to kill me since the day I was born.

You think of your mother. You think of her taste in men.

You look at your body again and you think maybe I can be tricked into loving you after all.

This kind of abuse runs in families anyway.

rlb 9.21.18

the thing with feathers

If

You walk back into my office.

Entire universes live and die on the fingertips of choice.

“I feel like an asshole–”

I stop breathing. Look you in the eye for the first time in a year smell the warm denim jacket skin unscented soap crushed lavender from across the room. In the winter of your pause I am in suspended animation living the memory of my arms around your perfect waist, soft, pulling you back into bed.

You aren’t looking at me.

I’m looking past every time you said I was something that could be fixed and into a future where kickstart apologies sputter into something bruised burning wilted growing up out of ashes the way forests do after wildfires.

“– I didn’t need that appointment after all.”

The splitsecond hairsbreadth moment passes.

I exhale.

“If” is the biggest word in the English language.

rlb 4.11.17

this isn’t supposed to be erotic

i don’t know whether heartbreak will ever stop tasting

like ripe white peaches ice cold in summer

soft fruitskin popping, giving under my teeth

meat catching between them and dripping

sticky pulses down my chin and fingers.

i pity anyone who has ever lost me.

 

5.29.18 rlb

debutante

i.

Death made me

a little giddy i’ll confess

brushing past on the ballroom floor, an

accidental meeting beneath

lead crystalglass refractions,

a not-quite-teasing

glance that i can’t

be bothered to return because

She left me

the courage to kiss

handsome

girls.

 

rlb 4.5.17