THINGS HAUNT
California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
The road ahead bends sideways and I lurch within myself.
I’m full of ugly feelings, awful thoughts, bad dreams
of doom, and so much love left unspoken.
Is mercury in retrograde? someone asks.
Someone answers, No, it’s something else
like that though. Something else like that.
That should be my name.
When you ask me am I really a woman, a human being,
a coherent identity, I’ll say No, I’m something else
like that though.
A true citizen of planet earth closes their eyes
and says what they are before the mirror.
A good person gives and asks for nothing in return.
I give and I ask for only one thing—
Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.
Hear me. Bear the weight of my voice and don’t forget—
things haunt. Things exist long after they are killed.
JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA
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🪷 Behekst 🪷
Kneeling upon your grave
A stargazer I have become
Murmuring incantations to the heavens
Prayers forever falling on deaf ears
I fear that the stars are out of wishes
I breathe in deep
But fear to exhale
The whispering windsong
Forever mirrors your voice
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Mahmoud Darwish, from "Mural", Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (tr. by Munir Akash & Carolyn Forché)
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Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? / @/oceaii (tumblr) / Liv Ullmann Changing / The Elektra Complex / Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman from "Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry / unknown / @/violentcherries (tumblr) / @/nutnoce (tumblr) / Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea / unknown
i. Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? [ "This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot." ]
ii. @/oceaii (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a deer. The deer looks forwards in the first panel and turns back to face the audience in the second panel. "Turn and face / the person you've become." ]
iii. Liv Ullmann Changing [ "I will never forget the loneliness I knew as a child. For a period in my life I hid behind a mask. Did not want to acknowledge any longing. / Now it is a part of me-something I can share. / Both the loneliness and the longing." ]
iv. The Elektra Complex [ "If you were to peel the skin of me apart as a fig's, you would finally understand. I am my mother's daughter. From poisoned seeds sprout poisoned fruits." ]
v. Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman [ "I didn't want / to be the dead star / that uses borrowed light to survive." ]
vi. unknown [ Black and white illustration of two deer. They are both labeled with words. The deer in the background says "just be." The deer in the foreground replies "just being is the hardest part." ]
vii. @/violentcherries (tumblr) [ "the environment you are not thriving in is not yours forever / IT'S OKAY TO LEAVE / ... / IT'S OKAY to abandon the things you used to love" ]
viii. @/nutnoce (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a scorpion doing chores. It's tail just barely curls over the front of a clothes line. Various pairs of socks hang from the clothes line. It stands before a bucket with more clothes inside. "I come from the toughest, meanest place you can imagine. / I want to be gentle, I want to die gently, but / It seems that when life gets hard / I have to get harder to match." ]
ix. Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea [ "I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar." ]
x. unknown [ "1. Man is a MORAL animal. / 2. You can get human beings to do anything - IF you can convince them it is moral. / 3. You can convince human beings that anything is moral." ]
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Things haunt, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
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