persephoneshellhounds

[persephoneshellhounds]

sun-drenched sapphic yearning ☀️

#wlw #sapphics #women loving women #queer

[persephoneshellhounds]

Eve's apples rot in the kitchen, black peel sinks further into the flesh, tainting, leaving marks of her sin until it turns into fists — rotten to the core. A young girl slowly grows up to be like her mother, peeling apples in the kitchen but they have a bad habit of turning black and rotting in the refrigerator, untouched, uneaten. a young girl slowly grows up to be like a wife — rotten to the core, tied to her core nightmare's theme.

When I started writing this poem, I thought I was writing about love but Eve's lover takes a bite of rotten apples in the kitchen and it isn't love — a heart is just the shape of a little girl's fist in captivity, just a rotten apple that I finger and toss and squeeze inside my angry fists until it bursts into a swarm of flies plaguing the air my lover breathes, like Eve's first sin — the downfall of man, an apple, now rotten,  now small enough next to my fists, small enough for my precisely-cut corruption — the anger in my chest caves in on itself to tailor-fit, snuggles like a baby bear, it almost looks as soft as my grazing fingers but i know better than to trust my hands, my age, my plastic mirror saying "You are her, you are her, you are her." I am my mother's ultraviolence daydream — I leave teeth marks on your neck, like Eve licking the poison on Lilith’s neck, taking a bite at her demise, microdosing a prayer addressed to the wrong god. I am my mother’s cackling shadow —  motherhood's anti-thesis — a rotten apple for fuck's sake — rotten to its infested core it's tempting to slice and lick and eat it all up — my madness, my rage, my femininity and its ironic tendency to destroy like a man don't you think? (I am beyond god’s forgiveness)

— Fray Narte, "Eve Outside of Eden" | Written November 29, 1:54 am, Revised December 27, 2023, 12:44 PM

Photo screencapped from: Ovoce Stromů Rajských Jíme (1970) // Dir. Věra Chytilová

#poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #poets #poets corner #writers community #writerscreed #writeblr #poeticsighs #poeticstories #inkstay #bitsofstarglow #smittenbypoetry #writtenconsiderations #pocketfullofpoesies #writingthestorm #writingundertheinfluence #twcpoetry #13cupsofteareblog #deadwatered #recognizingthevoiceless #fray narte #persephoneshellhounds #poets daily #poetry portal #poets elixir #writeblrcafe

[persephoneshellhounds]

the feminine urge to always be the first one to say goodbye yet always the last one to leave. — fray

photo screencapped from: foe (2023) // dir. garth davis

#poetry #spilled ink #poets #fray narte #persephoneshellhounds #girlrotting #girl rage #female hysteria #the feminine urge #femcel

[persephoneshellhounds]

Wanting to Die

by Anne Sexton

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.   Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention,   the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself,   have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,   have taken on his craft, his magic. In this way, heavy and thoughtful,   warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole. I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.   Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don’t always die, but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet   that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that, all by itself, becomes a passion.   Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say, and yet she waits for me, year after year,   to so delicately undo an old wound,   to empty my breath from its bad prison. Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,   raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon,   leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love whatever it was, an infection.

[persephoneshellhounds]

The Strawberry Poem by Keaton St. James

(patreon)

[ID: poem titled ‘The Strawberry Poem’ reading,

“i tell myself that once i make it to tomorrow, i will get up with the gold glow of the sun, tighten my scarf against the restless cold, & walk to the nearest grocery store. i will buy the biggest box of strawberries i can find, sit on my kitchen floor, eat them with my hands all in one shot.                                                      like a child or like god, i will stain some things red on accident. & still the foam-mouthed seas will churn under the gaze of the moon, & cardinals with snow- brushed wings will nestle themselves into pine branches the way a heart nestles itself into the ribs, & still i will have my laughter, yes, even when pain fills up my pockets like stones.                                                      but isn’t that the miracle? i was close enough to the river to kiss it, & i went home anyway. home, where it is so easy to spill sugar on the counter, drop tea leaves on the floor, forget splinters of cinnamon sticks & find them later behind the kettle, your mess the proof that you were not a ghost here but a body, solid & awake & true. home, where it is                                                     so easy to make a big joy from a small strawberry, to hold that sweet- ness in your mouth, its red as bright as wanting. its red that says, & how much more joy can we hold in another year, another decade, a whole recklessly beautiful life?”

/end ID]

[persephoneshellhounds]

you make me feel like a child — a fresh, full, rosy nectarine tossed into the sun only to fall into a knife, driven in deep, driven in slowly, i wish i was the one holding it — fight for control, i always say, no one can hurt me more than me, such a sad thing to say as a child behind the closed doors, the light flickers, unfixed, the dishes fly and crash into a hundred angry shards — my skin always catches its anger like a clueless paper target waiting for its demise — it tears through the sanity, the slow-moving daydreams spinning smaller and away, it leaves a picture behind: you make me feel like a helpless child, so young stuffing my cheap notebooks in a yellow hand-me-down bag from a local politician — my mother bangs against the door as if it was the life stolen from her. you make me feel like a child hiding in my room as my father’s voice rains down like a bomb dropped above my roof: an anomaly, a wannabe, a mistake, god fucking forbid i wanted something more than this misery. god fucking forbid i nail my ribs down to my heart, it bursts and stops.

you make me feel like a child, so powerless and choiceless and there are floors to polish and secrets to keep and a mess to clean, my filthy cheeks with filthy tears, i just got the nerve to cry, don’t i? well you make me feel like a fucking child, barely thirteen when i tried to kill myself ten years ago, “go on, do it.” well fuck, i wish i did and now, you make me feel like a child of war forced to live just for the fun of it, for you to slice with words and crawl and cry like a prey under our bed, i have nowhere else to hide, i hope angels are kinder and gentler i hope flowers grow on my body when i die — my grandmother’s jungle flames, so red it drips out of my skin, so red it matches your anger, loud and big enough to make me feel like i’m a child, fighting for her stupid life, i throw in cheap punches, yes i fight for my stupid life but i might just decide to die, this time.

for a change. you should see the look on your face.

— fray narte, "child of war"

#poetry #girlhood #fray narte #persephoneshellhounds #poems on tumblr

[persephoneshellhounds]

I no longer recognize the ghosts of the poems I've written in my girlhood but my melancholia has always been a constant — so neurotic, it's almost romantic — from the pile of poems I lost more than ten years ago to my book, Persephone, Descending. 🤎✨

You may buy a copy directly from 8Letters Bookstore & Publishing website or from their Shopee page.

P.S.: God, I miss writing.

#poetry #fray narte #persephoneshellhounds #poetry blog #poetry book #indie poets #indie authors

[persephoneshellhounds]

Draw badly. Write nonsensically. Embroider messily. Burn what you bake and cook. Get paint everywhere. Read half a book. Lose your mind for a bit. Plant things. Have faith in the process. Abandon 70 wood-carving projects. Get a kit and do some of it and never return to it. Get comfortable with sucking and losing motivation. Continue to create with reckless abandon.

[persephoneshellhounds]

i crawl like a bug all over rotten plums and marigolds, my lungs are filled with the stench of the dead, the desperate, the greenhouse ghosts from the corner of my eye, i briefly touch their outstretched arms, so cold it burns, so haunting, it stays and leaves all the same.

so cruel, it's comical

one day, i swear to all my abandoned gods, i’ll be able to breathe the air of my hometown and it won’t feel like dying.

— fray narte, "neurotic girls" | written august 16, 2023, 11:30 am

photo screencapped from: valerie & her week of wonders (1970) // dir. jaromil jires

#poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #poets #poets corner #writers community #writerscreed #writeblr #poeticsighs #poeticstories #inkstay #bitsofstarglow #smittenbypoetry #writtenconsiderations #pocketfullofpoesies #writingthestorm #writingundertheinfluence #twcpoetry #13cupsofteareblog #deadwatered #recognizingthevoiceless #fray narte #persephoneshellhounds #poets daily #poetry portal #poets elixir #writeblrcafe

[persephoneshellhounds]

Simply what freedom means ꨄ︎

Hecate by Stéphane Mallarmé in Les Dieux Antiques, nouvelle mythologie illustrée in Paris (1880) by Gio

Virginia Woolf by Lester

Les Etoiles (The Star) in upright position from Oswald Wirth's Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot Kabbalistique (1889) by Lester

#hecate #hekate #virginia woolf #the star tarot #tattoo #minimalist tattoo #dainty tattoo #spiritual tattoo #virginia woolf tattoo #aesthetic tattoo #tarot tattoo

[persephoneshellhounds]

[persephoneshellhounds]

my heart flutters like moth wings, once caught flightless on ice cold fire it’s forever looking for the kiss of the flames, the softest, kindest, slowest way of dying so that i may rest in a chest that’s not my own — yours, would you leave flowers on my tomb, once more? virginal white jasmines, if you remember — the color and predisposition of a ghost. would you kiss my resting ground, softening under torrential poems? would you say a made-up prayer? (my lover, who art in heaven) would you love me again if death is my rebirth, my second coming, how angels weep right next to me, how they break over my sorrows — pathetic bodies made of light, but they never burn, they never crash like fading embers. my heart’s still caught on ice cold fire, it flutters, wingless i arch in my quiet aching, godless, limbless — i’m sorry i’m made this way. in heaven, god fucked up for the first time twenty five years ago, he can take me back tomorrow for all i care but would you pick me, take me back and kiss me, bathe me in biblical oil (even if it kills me once more?) if i promise not to die once more?

— fray narte, "going insane in october" | written november 1, 2023, 5:11 PM

photo screencapped from: saltburn (2023) // dir. emerald fennell

#poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #poets #poets corner #writers community #writerscreed #writeblr #poeticsighs #poeticstories #inkstay #bitsofstarglow #smittenbypoetry #writtenconsiderations #pocketfullofpoesies #writingthestorm #writingundertheinfluence #twcpoetry #13cupsofteareblog #deadwatered #recognizingthevoiceless #fray narte #persephoneshellhounds #poets daily #poetry portal #poets elixir #writeblrcafe #saltburn

[persephoneshellhounds]

don't trust the poets 🍏🪰

photo screencapped from: valerie & her week of wonders (1970) // dir. jaromil jires

#fray narte #persephoneshellhounds #poetry #poets on tumblr #poets

[persephoneshellhounds]

[persephoneshellhounds]

How are you so quiet about it? your sadness i mean. how do you hold it in your chest, in your eyes, in your teeth without letting it speak; how does it stay still?

- Unknown

[persephoneshellhounds]

11/17/23

Turning 25 is something 13 year-old me would've find laughably unthinkable. She would've laughed at how excited I would get over 'my' little things —  my newest tattoo of Ophelia's death (done by josephia_tattoo), my girlfriend, and my cats. But that's okay because I can laugh at myself now and that's something she's yet to learn. ♡

#aesthetic tattoo #ophelia #feminine death #female madness #fray narte

[persephoneshellhounds]

earthbound

Virginia tried to be a Mermaid at the bottom of the Lake, her last attempt at Magic whispered in the current She bled upon the pages to Purge herself of poison but The bruises in her eyes Were never healed The light grows distant The stars forget; we can But long for feathers As we gaze upon the sky Those of us who itch of Stardust can’t be blamed For the sense that Something’s always missing All our lives we have Only ever dreamed of What it feels like to fly