food for hungry ears and thirsty hearts

01/02/2021* 43.398935, -80.482061

I want to love you so well, your heart relaxes its shoulders all the way down; your body lets out the breath its been holding. I want my love to be such a safe place, the walls never shiver with sharp tongues or high volume. a love solid enough, when you count your worries for the day, our happiness sits miles from the list.

Excerpt from the poem “Parts Of Me I Haven’t Met Yet (Part 1)” by Schuyler Peck (@schuylerpeck) , featured in her collection “You Look Like Hell” 🌙

schuyler peck (@schuylerpeck) can't get enough of my love \\ sanna wani \\ charles oluf olsen goal

kofi

I let my nails grow longer than usual and spend the afternoon tapping them against my office desk, a coffee mug, digging my fingerprints into smooth apple skin. soon enough, I imagine a closet of crimson, thick black sunglasses, cigarette smoke serpentining from the fault line of my mouth, chuckling a “what a pity,” before tossing a lit match into a trash can of memories. I laugh at how my daydreams paint me until I realize I’ve been running to slow jazz. my heartbeat never soothes its gallop—everything sounds louder in comparison. my voice cracks when I ask my therapist, “if I’ve broken into a new side of myself, is this how I’m always going to feel?” craft scissors into electrical wire. a hot pink buzzsaw. I miss the days of feeling my heart soak through my shirt as if pulpy grapefruit; how swooned I could be by the sky. I know it’s not gone, not entirely, but I’m tired of picking needles from my teeth. I miss a gentler touch.

schuyler peck / instagram: hiitssky / facebook

poem found in my book, You Look Like Hell

schuyler peck / insta: hiitssky / facebook

poem "Soured Milk" found in my book, You Look Like Hell

it wouldn't be fair to call them all nightmares, exactly, but the moment I say "bad dreams," I'm rubbing tears from my face, standing in the doorframe of my parents' room again, pajamas balled into my fists. it's never that I believed we grow out of them, but I didn't imagine, nearing the end of my twenties, the sullen haze that hangs over me after waking—still clinging to my clothes long into the afternoon. I know well the extreme: the jolt out of bed when a blood-slicked phone slips from my hands. when the bad guys are coming back and I put on a good performance of dead. so when my pillowcase is sweat-soaked after spotting my father at the grocery store, I don't know what to say. I can't shake off a short glimpse in the mirror, where I'm envisioned as sickly thin as I aspired to be in high school. my mind casts my ex-husband as a background character for a whole week straight, but it's without a knife, without a gun, without a ring, so I struggle to explain exactly why I've gone quiet.

bad dream. I'd shrink under any sympathetic pout, shrug off any arm wrapped around my shoulder. it's not that I want the reassurance I've escaped my small terrors, but maybe they've grown so frequent and enduring, I'd sooner not dream at all.

The Glass Essay, Anne Carson | Molly Brodak, Molly Brodak

in a perfect world, those two are the call

and this is the response