My sister is not an animal. I am very clear about this when I introduce her to people and she starts rubbing her hands over my hair and making weird chittering sounds and, every now and then, turning into a raccoon. “She’s absolutely still a human. It’s just an Ozzy thing,” I say to our middle school principal when I have to drag a fluffy bandit out of the janitor’s closet before pest control accidentally kills a student. “It’s just an Ozzy thing,” I explain to my first boyfriend when we find a ball of gray fur spinning in circles on the living room couch. “It’s just an Ozzy thing,
Sisyphus is stuck in the airport waiting for the monsoon to end and the planes to start flying again. He is now agonizing over not booking the earlier flight, which was more expensive but which would have meant he could be on his way to Elysium right now, this very moment, instead of being stuck in the airport. Across the aisle, a father tries in vain to hush three very loud children. They are screaming something about missing the newest episode of their favorite cartoon. The mother repeatedly promises to go buy them snacks and charge their iPads when the electricity comes back on, but to no avail. Sisyphus remembers with a sudden surge of an
I want to stay here for eternity
Resting on the shores of my dreams
As I roll a pearl between my tongue and the roof of my mouth
Back and forth, back and forth
The waters beckon me
Gently tug on my clothes
They insist that I feel how cool how salty how
Immense their body is beneath me
Hoping to impress themselves upon my skin
Hard enough that the sun won’t dry it up
But I don’t move, I’m resting
A little crab plucks at my toes
To remind me that I’m awake
The beach forgets its footprints
Wind whips sand into my eyes
It is not clear to me what I’m supposed to bring in my picnic basket
Or which sea shells to tak
A reasonable petition to anxiety by VolkesWagondaOtaku, literature
Literature
A reasonable petition to anxiety
Phones ringing off the hook in my poor fool brain
I can’t tease apart the stimuli
Hey, operator, could you not
Redirect these calls to the wrong center
Stop leaving voicemails I’ll never get to
Stop misspelling names and forgetting phone numbers
I’d really appreciate a little clarity in there
A better filing system, maybe, a little less dust
Hallways that don’t start and stop in the middle of nowhere
Wrinkles that don’t fold into themselves like old prunes
I swear, I’m a bright and cheerful woman
They say I bring color to the room
Just like flowers do
And balloons do
(Ugly vases too)
So it would be helpful
Plus ten points for being oppressed by VolkesWagondaOtaku, literature
Literature
Plus ten points for being oppressed
‘Poetry is pain’
A poet once told me
As if poems weren’t a celebration
As if the writing and reading of it
Weren’t a sweet illicit pleasure
As if songs didn’t remind me of eating oysters
Or of sunkissed laughter
Or of sex
As if to navigate the world with grace
One must first obtain a degree in suffering
As if the word ‘exploitation’ didn’t make my lips tingle
With the fullness of that sound—
How many times must we, the certified oppressed, beat our pain into new ghastly shapes?
It’s not the pain that makes a poem.
How can you love this
When you don’t understand
The pursuit
metaphorical blizzard of an ambition thwarted by VolkesWagondaOtaku, literature
Literature
metaphorical blizzard of an ambition thwarted
All day indoors as the winter collapses around me.
Do you think Emily Dickinson had an exercise routine?
Would she have been the type to subscribe to a private gym
Drink green smoothies and practice meditation
Watch online videos about skincare and coconut water
Presumably she baked -
Wrote letters - impassioned - a silent vortex of words -
The economy of motion expressed by condensed punctuation - a dash - that generous multitasker of a pause in breath -
How did she do it, living within such confines?
I found myself sprawled like a toppled ‘i’
Watching sleet streak the windows and smudge the smudgy skies
All day indoors as lo
Reading Chen Chen and eating a mandarin
I am amazed at my brazen nails, so small
Cut too close to the cuticles by my over-cautious Nai Nai
Yet they dig into the tense pebbled flesh
Wa wa like a gravedigger on New Year’s Eve
The stain gets underneath my fingernails
All day my hands smell of tian tian citrus
I want someone to explain myself to me
More than I want to explain myself.
Is this why we read poetry?
After all the time I spend explaining other people’s ideas back to them
It would be nice to have myself explained back to me
By someone whom I can be an echo
Crying my name and I love you again and again to deaf ears
Yet hea
The Queen looks in the mirror, and with her magic powers she twists the glass this way and that. The cool surface bulges and ripples. The Queen warps tall as a giant, small as a mouse, fat or thin, flesh turned to liquid. She could pour her body into a sieve and let it fall into a pleasing mold. And yes—even now her body distends, her breasts grow enormous, her belly stretches taut. And then she’s thin again. In the realm of the mirror she has perfect control over her image. She looks in, and a girl with blood red lips and snow white cheeks looks back, eyes huge and black and oblong. She is the most beautiful in the land. The fai
vagabond witch + socialite witch by VolkesWagondaOtaku, literature
Literature
vagabond witch + socialite witch
This is not an ice cream truck. Clearly there was an attempt, during its accursed creation, to make the thing look like an ice cream truck. It is painted in bright colors, plays a jaunty little tune as it swings past, and is labeled in a large, easy-to-read font: ICE CREAM. But it is not an ice cream truck.
These sleepy New England suburbs have never seen the like. Adults who live here startle when they hear the cheerful, artificial tune, and look offended that such a city beast should be transplanted into the suburbs. The children, on the other hand, are fascinated. The not-an-ice-cream-truck makes its way slowly down the streets every F