bumbleblossoms:

braid your curly hair like fresh challah,
the smell of it filling the air around you
spray perfume of apples and honey on your skin
to prepare for a sweet new day
all around you is history,
and you weave your family into each breath and step
gone is a performance, this is your culture
and each task is done with love

- Miriam Kamens, Jewish woman

(via pomegranateandhoney)

ronibravo:

thinkin thoughts! this one’s called “niche market”

(via onlyevergoingup)

“Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: ‘It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it.’ And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?”
— “59. it’s beautiful, but I don’t like it” from 100 essays I don’t have time to write: on umbrellas and sword fights, parades and dogs, fire alarms, children, and theater, Sarah Ruhl. (via a-witches-brew)

(via mitski-miyawakis)

“I’ve been driven to action by hearing a poem. I’ve participated in direct actions that wouldn’t take place without poems being there to anchor them. Activism is a full-branching tree. I get uncomfortable when we start to entirely dismiss whole branches.”

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, for Amy King’s 

“Young Poets Bare All: What Is a Culture?”

(via

bostonpoetryslam

)

(via blythebaird)

“That’s the best thing about language: every time you use a word you are summoning so many other things—all the times that word has ever been used. I know this sounds a little psychedelic, but maybe I have an ancestor one hundred years ago who used this word that I choose to write now. What does it mean that everything that we are writing is recycled? Words are full of ghosts. Poetry is full of ghosts.”

aphroditeinfurs:

my mom: you don’t need to wear that much makeup we are only going to the grocery store no one is looking at u

me: well if you’ve heard of Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon u would realize that as citizens of a capitalist western society we are all surveilled and constantly viewed and judged 247 and even when we are not in a public place, privately we subconsciously monitor our own selves, our appearances, our social interactions, we discipline ourselves and conform this is how the modern day surveillance state works someone is always watching or else u are always constantly painfully aware of ur own self. also can u buy me $50 foundation

(via isitbatman)

“Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth. Only love can give us the strength to go forward in the midst of heartbreak and misery. Only love can give us the power to reconcile, to redeem, the power to renew weary spirits and save lost souls. The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change. Without love our lives are without meaning. Love is the heart of the matter. When all else has fallen away, love sustains.”
— bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (via sftn)

(via gracefree-deactivated20180902)

“When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame. When we believe “we must be this” we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down.”
“in the absence of speech
we bake bread.
we slow dance.
we kiss with 
our eyes.

instead: our hands
kneading love into
winged bellyaches.

instead: our knees
perfect robins’ eggs
blushing into orbit.

instead: our mouths
with nothing left
to say.”
“The Softly” after Jeffrey McDaniel, Natalie Wee (via chainedtocomets)

(via 5000letters)

realhayleyghoover:

peachofcake:

thehedaheart:

theboyywhocouldfly:

MASHUP

Uptown Funk + Get’cha Head in the Game, High School Musical

(Tumblr Audio version)

OLD WORLD AND NEW COLLIDE OH MY

OMG jetbagscousin

PURE GENIUS 

(via )

“You know how every once in a while you do something and the little voice inside says ‘There. That’s it. That’s why you’re here’ … and you get a warm glow in your heart because you know it’s true? Do more of that.”
“I do want to create art beyond rage. Rage is a place to begin, but not end. I’m not as wise as my work, but I know if I take the writing deep enough, something larger and greater than myself will flash forth and illuminate me, heal me. I do want to devour my demons—despair, grief, shame, fear—and use them to nourish my art. Otherwise they’ll devour me.”
Sandra Cisneros, from “I Can Live Sola and I Love to Work,” A House of My Own: Stories From My Life
(via lifeinpoetry)

(via gracefree-deactivated20180902)

“I thought about the notebooks I filled up in high school, the ones that I’m still too scared to open up and revisit, not because I think my bad writing will make me cringe, but because I’m afraid my bad writing will make me yearn to write like that again—and I don’t mean writing poems that compare my loneliness to a black hole or my love to a prairie devastated by fire, but rather to write with tremendous heart and without concern for taste or craft, without concern for the entire wretched literary canon that has come before me, the literary canon that is still mostly populated by boring, uninspiring white dudes whose writing will never change my life.”
“I told my mom I was “born this way” to assure her that she hadn’t made mistakes in the way she mothered me, and to assure myself that I wasn’t a mistake, too. But three years later, I had to question why I needed to be a born a certain way. What if my mother did have a hand in crafting my queerness? Why did she believe that contributing to my magical queer self was an evil rather than a good? Why do I need to claim that my queerness is unchanging and natural to be safe from people who will do anything to control me, to ensure that I can’t dream up new selves and determine who I will be? Because I did change. At 17, I told myself and others that I was a gay man. At 20, I don’t identify as gay, and I don’t identify as a man.”

Theatre Gothic

adventures-in-theatre:

- You dream of the stage. The spotlight shines on you, the audience holds their breath for you to speak. Your lines, someone mouths to you. You do not know who, you did not see them, you did not hear them. You cannot remember your lines. You look down, a cold sweat forming on your brow. You notice that you are in your underwear. The audience stares. You are not dreaming.

- Backstage, you wait. Standing alone in the darkness of the wing, a black shape shifts past you. You have no proof of them other than the breeze felt by their passing and the shadow you thought you caught in the corner of your eye. Another shape moves past, behind you. Another, in front. Perhaps they aren’t passing you, perhaps they’re coming closer, together. The techies. They move.

- You wait in center stage for the light to come on. It is only dark. It has been dark for as long as you can remember. A low buzzing can be heard, and the stage lights begin to glow, softly, growing brighter, quickly. They are so bright now. You cannot see the audience. You look down, you cannot see your hands. It is so bright. You can no longer feel your body, you are no longer a physical form. 

- You shower after the show, trying to wash off the stage makeup. The water runs flesh color at first, then black. There is so much makeup. Glitter falls from your hair. Why is there glitter? You think. I will never be clean, you whisper into the dark recesses beyond the drain. Eyelashes are falling now, in clumps, whether they are fake or real you do not know. Everything falls, everything is washed away. You become faceless, and yet streaks of waterproof mascara remain. 

- You are only called by your character name, you can not remember the last time you were called by your real name. You can not remember your real name. You are changing.

- Red leather, yellow leather, they chant. The step closer to you, circling you. There is no escape. They chant softly at first, growing louder, walking faster. They break into a jazz run, they are screaming now. You try to chant as well, you try to keep up. You are sweating, yelling. Red leather, yellow leather. Red leather yellow leather. They are coming towards you, waiting for you to fail, to fall. Red yellow, leather pleather, you finally slip. They close in. You have lost.