Please enjoy this photo of my rat smiling at the sun ☀️

trippy handmade woolen “Glitch” rugs by Faig Ahmed - these are full size rugs with incredible handiwork! 

Painted with tea because water colours are expensive

Fisher Girls on the Beach, 1881.

Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910) 

Watercolour over graphite on paper

At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon and beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts. I fought with my knuckles white as stars, and left bruises the shape of Salem. There are things we know by heart, and things we don’t.    At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke. I’d watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos, but I could never make dying beautiful. The sky didn’t fill with colors the night I convinced myself veins are kite strings you can only cut free. I suppose I love this life,   in spite of my clenched fist.   I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree, and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers, and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath the first time his fingers touched the keys the same way a soldier holds his breath the first time his finger clicks the trigger. We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.   But my lungs remember the day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly and told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister’s heartbeat. And I knew life would tremble like the first tear on a prison guard’s hardened cheek, like a prayer on a dying man’s lips, like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone… just take me      just take me   Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much, the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood. We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways, but you still have to call it a birthday. You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess and hope she knows you can hit a baseball further than any boy in the whole third grade   and I’ve been running for home through the windpipe of a man who sings while his hands playing washboard with a spoon on a street corner in New Orleans where every boarded up window is still painted with the words We’re Coming Back like a promise to the ocean that we will always keep moving towards the music, the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.   Beauty, catch me on your tongue.  Thunder, clap us open. The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks. Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona dessert, then wake us washing the feet of pregnant women who climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun. I know a thousand things louder than a soldier’s gun. I know the heartbeat of his mother.   Don’t cover your ears, Love. Don’t cover your ears, Life. There is a boy writing poems in Central Park and as he writes he moves and his bones become the bars of Mandela’s jail cell stretching apart, and there are men playing chess in the December cold who can’t tell if the breath rising from the board is their opponents or their own, and there’s a woman on the stairwell of the subway swearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn, and I’m remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrun with strip malls and traffic and vendors and one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it.    Ya’ll, I know this world is far from perfect. I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon. I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic. But every ocean has a shoreline and every shoreline has a tide that is constantly returning to wake the songbirds in our hands,  to wake the music in our bones, to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river that has to run through the center of our hearts to find its way home.

-Andrea Gibson

the pulsing of traffic through the streets: Birthday

Why Your Nonbinary Friend Didn't Correct That Person Who Misgendered Them

I live in a pretty liberal area and I'm out as nonbinary in most places I frequent, but I still have a lot of acquaintances I'm not out to. Not because I'm afraid they'll react with open hostility, but because it's exhausting to expend the energy to say "they" (or swallow my urge to) every single time someone who already knows I'm not a woman calls me She or Miss or Ma'am or Lady. I already have a full roster of people who know that I'm genderqueer and that I use They pronouns, but who rarely if ever use the right language to describe me.

If I think it's unlikely someone will actually make the effort, I'd rather just be read incorrectly as a woman by someone who doesn't know any better than be misgendered by someone who I've taken the risk to come out to. If I'm going to be misgendered either way I'd rather it be an accident.

A lot of the time I berate myself as cowardly for not being out everywhere to everyone, since I've got it easier than a lot of other people (I'm white and able-bodied and I work somewhere with a nondiscrimination policy). I feel like I have a duty to the people who come after me. But just because I'm not generally at risk of bodily harm doesn't mean I have unlimited emotional energy to make advocating for myself my full-time job.

Coming back from the farmers market

Person: Why do you hate centerist?

Centerist:

Me:…I have my reasons.

Art by Benjamin Paulus

I don’t want to hear what you have to say unless it’s both stupid and absurd

jesus had his palms gauged 

Berliners are sending a piece of the Berlin Wall to Trump, with the message: “We would like to give you one of the last pieces of the failed Berlin Wall to commemorate the United States’ dedication to building a world without walls”

PIECE OF THE BERLIN WALL WITH MESSAGE FOR TRUMP GOES ON U.S.-MEXICO BORDER TOUR AFTER WHITE HOUSE REJECTS ‘GIFT’ 11/18/19

Citizens of Berlin

https://thewallagainstwalls.com/