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Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted—wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss (via spacesamidlove)
When Ophelia appears onstage in Act IV, scene V, singing little songs and handing out imaginary flowers, she temporarily upsets the entire power dynamic of the Elsinore court. When I picture that scene, I always imagine Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Horatio sharing a stunned look, all of them thinking the same thing: “We fucked up. We fucked up bad.” It might be the only moment of group self-awareness in the whole play. Not even the grossest old Victorian dinosaur of a critic tries to pretend that Ophelia is making a big deal out of nothing. Her madness and death is plainly the direct result of the alternating tyranny and neglect of the men in her life. She’s proof that adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for the fun of it. They’re driven there by people in their lives who should have known better. I think Shakespeare probably understood that better than most people do today.
B.N. Harrison, “The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness”
(via days-of-reading)
(via days-of-reading)
They’re girls. They were born in danger and will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.
An Echo In The Bone (via apriki)
I am a dangerous woman,
but the weapon is not visible.
Security will never find it.
They can’t hear the clicking
of the gun inside my head
Joy Harjo, from “I Am a Dangerous Woman,” How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002
(via governesses)
(via governesses)
You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.
There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.
Louise Glück, from “Averno,” Averno: Poems (via salvyaplath)
Do you have stars
in your mouth?
she asks
and I laugh,
she’s never tasted
winter like I have,
midnights that linger
for days. Yes,
I tell her. Come see.Will there be breath?
For a while, I whisper
and blow on her hands,
but you will sing
and the aurora lights
will walk across the ice.She lets me
put my hands on her.Will I die? her hair
like snow.
Yes. I tell her.
Every time.
Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
Both a little drunk in the afternoon
with the forgotten smart of August on our skin
we hold hands as if we were still children…
Anne Sexton, from “Doors, Doors, Doors” (via governesses)
It’s dark.
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood
in a room of empty pianos.When you return to something you love,
it’s already beyond repair.
You wear it broken.
James L. White, from “Lying in Sadness” in The Salt Ecstasies (via provst)
When our breasts arrived
as a kind of currency, we’d tug
our camisoles low, use
our newfangled bodies to haggle
with the ice cream man. The winner
was the girl who received her chocolate cone
for free, who sucked on candy cigarettes
the same way she wore a training bra.
That summer my pockets grew forests
of hand-tied maraschino cherry stems:
tampered evidence that I might one day be worthy
of kissing. In exchange for rides
on the handlebars of their bikes,
we’d let the boys bite
the beads off our candy
necklaces until the chokers
resembled punched out teeth.
From their slobber, blue and violet
stained my throat where the sweetness
had once been, so I suppose,
Your Honor, I was preparing
for him.
Megan Falley, “Beginning in an Ice Cream Truck and Ending in a Court Room (After Kim Addonizio)” (via petrichour)
