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date idea

The sharp scent of rain tumbles clumsily in as you tease window-hinges wider with the pads of your fingers. A siren trails close behind, uninvited, sears your eardrums, dies off down the block. Your neighbors are arguing again. Laundry, loans, lack of commitment… like yesterday, like the day before. You think it would be suffocating to wrap yourself up in someone else’s sheets.  It’s five o’clock. Leaning against the sill and flicking the radio dial with one recently manicured nail, you tune into the local news. Roaring wall of static, then calm conversation between two anchors bubbling up through an old set of Panasonic loudspeakers. You are feeling incomplete today, like yesterday, like the day before. Rigatoni boils in the kitchen. You check the leftmost cabinet and find strawberry jam, unopened. You check the cupboard and look over a tub of tahini, a collection of canned soup, and a stack of pie tins. You check the counter, behind the cutlery. Finally, you check the fridge, ducking down to see only your own brown-eyed reflection in one last — now empty — jar of Prego. Your shoulders dip. You slip on white sneakers, not-so-white-as-they-once-were. Why did you try to paint the front door? It is peeling now, ugly like a fledgling losing young feathers. Flecks of buttery yellow dapple paisley carpeting. The great outdoors wait for you at the bottom of a cramped stairwell with twin light fixtures, both broken. A sky like an old sweater is draped above Brooklyn, ready to wring itself out again at any moment. Once around the block, rubber soles brushing damp cement, you walk briskly. At first you fling yourself against the humidity, then become self-conscious and adopt a slower pace as you near the corner store. Two dollars, sixty cents. Like last week, like the week before.  You and I, we are looking down at our phones and stumble into each other, halfway home. It is no one’s fault. You recognize me from somewhere, you say, and feel like a bad person for lying. You have never seen me before in your life. I ask for your number. That night you eat too quickly, knowing you’ll wish you’d saved some leftovers. I come over once, then again. We go out for dinner at tacky restaurants, where art deco posters from the nineteen-thirties have pinned themselves up in scattered flocks across worn-out drywall and the menu is printed with strange font on laminated placemats. The appetizer sample photos are unnerving; the bruschetta cowers like a scared animal awash in excessive camera flash. I make a joke about it, and you laugh. We order dishes to share. The food is always better than I expected, but not quite as good as you wanted it to be. You don’t mind. We talk for hours. We agree, ballpoint pens are better. I hold you, and the ten p.m. bus pulls you out of my arms and through the dusky streets, past crowds and utility poles. I hold you, and we rhyme our steps. Burgundy is around us in the leaves and in the dirt. You wear a coat I gave you. I hold you, and we swat flies out on your porch. The days are getting shorter. I hold you, and we watch blu-ray CDs you found on sale. Soft light from the flatscreen plays across your face as you fall asleep. I keep the movie on a little longer. I hold you. In December, we bring a blanket to Long Island and listen to the sound of snow falling on the dunes. You call in sick for work too often. I hold you, and you know my callouses well. We share the same sheets; we are wrapped up in each other. I hold you, and kiss your hair. You smell like candied oranges. The afternoons eat away at one another. Dishes pile like uneven layer-cakes in your kitchen sink, crested with suds. You say you feel uninspired. Now we argue about laundry, and the sounds of your unhappy apartment are heard through half-open windows.  You shout, eyebrows furrowed like the pages of a book. A white plate soars from the grip of a trembling hand, misses an upturned chin, and interrupts us with its shattering. This time, it’s different. Sleep escapes us ‘til the sun is already planted on the easternmost rooftop. I hurt you the way I learned to, and stay awhile, but don’t know why I stay. We sink into sweet, heavy things: the saxophone in “Charcoal Baby”, shared creamsicles on hot Saturday evenings. I see you less and less, and remember less and less of you. Will I see you next week? Yes, if you text me. You forget, just like we’d both hoped.

@ad

Sep 17, 2024

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War(w)hol(e): sleeping in a storm

She says there’s a tornado watch, and I shrug it off as I turn another page to my book. I just want to be reminded of what used to be real for a while before I join her to bed. I have 90 minutes before the dreams take me back for what I owe them. In the meantime, I’m with Ultra and Andy. I’m back in a place where the shitty instant movies meant something, not because they inherently meant something, but because a soup can was empty enough for the public to carry. Carry it they would, with enough means to make Ultra regret her own full stomach. The cans she had Andy sign could’ve funded her retirement, but the Factory was hungry. I’ve yet to create my food art that gets people interested in my shit movies. The wind starts growling against the windows in a way I haven’t heard in the decade I’ve lived here. The rain sounds sideways. I wake her from the bathroom as the wind has caught me on a break, and the living room is more window than wall. We’ve taken to sleeping on an air mattress in the living room floor by the windows. It was lovely under the tree in December, but now there’s no hiding why. It feels too real for a moment. I ask her to double check the radar. She says it’s fine, and she goes back to sleep. She already has me put on rain sounds with another apartment view on the TV nightly, though I don’t think either of us would have heard a difference had I turned it off now. Andy believed we would prefer the simulation. I‘m afraid he may be right. I’m afraid because I can’t control the one with a remote. Yes, that’s usually true, but for the moment I’m more afraid of the one outside my actual window that has no remote. Pontificating about simulacra or not, I’m afraid. As the storm starts to calm, the red light hitting my blinds from the LEDs is flashing. A fire truck is outside my window. Are these red lights more real, more meaningful? Do they make my fear more meaningful? The fire truck leaves (me). My 90 minutes have become 3 hours. My debt is greater. I can’t hide, and I’m afraid. It’s time to pay. I’ll simulate another violent death, wake up, and feel a little less convinced I’m about to be killed again since we’re in the living room. The lights help me see less of what isn’t there. I can see the front door bar intact with my own eyes. I’m safe enough to die in my sleep again. Good morning.

@spasi

Feb 16, 2025

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9th grade poetry for school

just something i wrote for an assignment in 9th grade English. also if you recognize the mitski quote hidden in the poem don't tell my school I plagiarized pretty please i. I am to be born anew in ten days.  I can feel it In my skin. It pulses under the flesh Like a river, rushing through my veins. A change is fast approaching and I am not strong enough to withstand it. ii. I am too vulnerable, too fragile to change. I am one to be crushed under a boot, I cannot endure this change that will come in 9 days' time.  I am afraid. Afraid. iii. My mother changed only weeks ago. She is as young as I soon will be. Her children, my siblings, are many. I am one in one thousand and I will be lost in a haze of orange when we change. It will be brilliant, it will be, Fleeting. Our beauty will last only seconds in the eyes of those who look upon us. Mother, I am to be young again.  Mother, were you scared? Were you scared mother? I am scared of the change to come. iv. My hunger grows with each passing day, as does my fear. Some of my siblings have already started to settle. They seek out the places closer to the sky, as if, even in this life before the next, they long to be weightless, held only by the cold wind that I feel on my back.  They do not seem afraid, as I am. They turn their heads to the sky, facing down the wide expanse of blue like the ant faces a hurricane. They do not cower, only waiting for the change they know is coming. They are resilient in ways I am not. I am not, I am not, I am not. Please, I am not them, please, I cannot withstand this. I am afraid, do you hear?  I, who make no sound, am screaming I am afraid of the change to come. v. Today, I reflect. My life, as short as it is, is coming to an end. In five days, I will become someone else. In five days, I am to live a new life in a new body.  Mother, you are dying soon. Soon, my new body will replace yours in the kaleidoscope. Soon, mother, soon. I do not want to leave the ground, I do not want to take flight like I am intended to. Mother, soon, too soon.  vi. I have begun the change.  Soon, mother. Soon. ix. This barrier between me and my new world has begun to crack. I push at the walls of my chrysalis with new arms, new legs. This new body has not seen the outside world but it is unafraid. How? How did something so sensitive become a rock in a river? I had thought, before my new mind settled in my head, that my fear would remain.  Even if my body had changed, my mind would remain. But it has not, and I am just like my siblings. Their resilience which I had only witnessed when I had looked into their dark eyes, and seen the look on their faces, has become mine.  Oh mother, is this how you felt? Was I wrong to ask if you were afraid? You were, weren’t you? Just like me, my mother, like me. And like me you weathered your storm, you were born anew and unafraid. i. I am different. I feel it, in a way unlike any other. My body has changed but my mind as well. Before, I was guided by the will to survive. Before, I was not looking to the skies because there was nothing in them for me to look at, but now, now my weary head turns to the sky as almost second nature. It calls to me, to my newborn wings and my young resolve to conquer it.  I am finally living. Mother, is this what you felt like? Did you live as well? This change, this change, I am alive, for the first time, I live.   Oh, mother, I am not afraid. I will face the skies,         Unafraid.        And the wind will push my frail body   but I will not fall, no,         These new wings,  they will take flight and I will rise, Do you hear? Mother? I will rise, just like you.  I am born anew.

@salmune

May 13, 2024

Top Recs from @mattyepez

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THEBRUTALIST & NOSFERATU

Watching these two films this week has really pulled me out of a funk and reminded me of the type of work I wanna put out. Film is not just content and algorithms, it is living and breathing through the efforts of bold and daring artists.

@mattyepez

Dec 30, 2024

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Her Body and other parties

by Carmen Maria Machado is a collection of short stories that really got me back into a reading kick. My fav is the one set during a pandemic and a woman documenting a series of hookups and how each one differs from the other as a virus slowly consumes society. Would recommend

@mattyepez

Jan 2, 2025

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VIBES

Also wtf???? I love the energy of this site.

@mattyepez

Dec 30, 2024