july '21: collection

[grainfall]

better late than never

POETRY


What the body does not know 

it wants. And the mind.

In the song I wrote,

I said I wanted to be 

like you, but then

I pulled back.

— Phosphorescence by Cynthia Cruz

What things are steadfast? Not the birds.

[...] Fragile and momentary, we continue.

Fearing madness in all things huge

and their requiring. Managing as thin light

on water. Managing only greetings

and farewells. We love a little, as the mice

huddle, as the goat leans against my hand. [...]

 

— We Manage Most When We Manage Small by Linda Gregg

 

Today I’ll wake up better, call

the distance order, order it to be

a smaller thing. I’ll stand to make it so. 

 

— Order by Dan Rosenberg

 

Because beached animals know sand
will smother any open mouth. Because 
a body in motion knows the ground. We
alit shore clean of the sea we wove through. 
We throated harsh American accents
& muzzled breathing, only to be offered 
a name half-pronounced. Haunting, 
they called me, instead of Huan Ting. A single
exhale dislocating phantom from girl.

— “Can You Speak English?” by Natalie Wee

 

JOURNALISM

Chiellini, Bonucci and the Art of Defending : the euro 2020 football tournament! grew up in a family that was quite invested in sports so i do love football. nothing brings people together quite like sports (see: 2018 football world cup.) in particular i love reading about defenders because football tends to be a sport that focuses quite a bit on strikers but this is a nice article about italy's defensive backbone (chiellini + bonucci) and their partnership! i liked the part where one of their former teammates said "When you have been through so many moments together, you know what is happening, how the other one will respond [...] They compensate for each other." aughhhhh i love sports.

RESURRECTING THE CHAMP : this is an OLD article from 1997 (!!!) an in-depth profile of bob satterfield (a boxer) with a twist. i knew absolutely nothing about this article when i started reading, and it's a long article, but it's not as straightforward as it sounds and it's. good. there’s a quote from it that goes "One of the primary things boxing is about is lying,” Joyce Carol Oates writes in “On Boxing.” “It’s about systematically cultivating a double personality: the self in society, the self in the ring." i found out later there's a movie based off this article

 

There’s Nothing Adam Ondra Can’t Climb, but Is an Olympic Medal Out Of Reach? : i read up about sports climbing after they announced it would be an event at the olympics. this is a little bit about why the combined climbing disciplines at the olympics were controversial but mostly about adam ondra, one of the best climbers in the world. he didn't end up winning a medal at tokyo but the video of him climbing silence is so stunning

 

There’s A Specific Kind Of Joy We’ve Been Missing : "You can feel depressed and anxious alone, but it’s rare to laugh alone or love alone. Joy shared is joy sustained.”

OTHER THINGS

We all flinched from the theatrical sound of his voice. It was too much for people like us, too genuine and passionate. Some love could survive being put on show like that, but almost every kind of love that I knew would wither through it, curl up from shame and exposure and die.

— The Chosen and The Beautiful, Nghi Vo

Q: How important is the power of language in what you do?

A: My current obsession is looking at language as a starting point of imagining the future. It started when I was thinking about how it’s interesting that in the Malay language, there isn’t a specific word for “future” but there’s a specific word for the day after tomorrow. It got me thinking about time in relation to cultures, and how different cultures have different perceptions of time. I saw this as an opportunity to think and write about language as an entry point to talk about temporality and how different communities/cultures imagine time, past, present and future. What would one of many futures look like based on cultural definitions of time?

— Singapore Writers Festival: An Interview with Bani Haykal

Alice, you must be the fulcrum of your own universe, and I feel the shame in my chest, that I can only pivot around people.

— Ministry of Moral Panic, Amanda Lee Koe

FICS

The weight of certainty in the fact Minghao is filling the space they share with objects, with a myriad of small and less small things tethering them materially to this reality. It is a stupid thought to have, maybe, but it is awfully reassuring for Seokmin to know there is simply too much stuff in their apartment for Minghao to just vanish with half of it overnight. It blows him away every morning, when he walks into their kitchen (their kitchen!) and sees the espresso machine Minghao bought for himself, and the wine rack he absolutely had to have, and the framed copy of his first magazine cover. Things— things matter because they are proof of life, and of a willingness to stay. Things matter because their belonging is blurry: Minghao ends up wearing half the shit he buys for Seokmin. The point is always the meaning.

— spend it all on you by figure8

On the train, still without his uniform, he thinks about safehouses and the way Earth was always louder than space, how even the silence breathed. How watching Jihoon in twilight, naked of his suit, it seemed like he was burning a hole in the air. He thinks about the first time they felt rain, together, and they were shocked into stillness, their faces turned up until blood and sweat ran into their eyes.

"No one told me it was beautiful," Jihoon whispered once in a dark hangar, and Mingyu plays that moment back a thousand times after the war ends, after Jihoon disappears.

He wants to say, I was so young I'd never kissed anyone before, but I wanted it to be you. He wants to say, I've kissed a lot of people now, and I still want it to be you. He wonders what kind of man Jihoon is now. If he still loves to fly, and hates hurting people.

— synodic, sidereal by agonies (Hyb)

Wonwoo doesn’t remember much of the plot of that movie he watched a long time ago, but he does remember that the main character was in love with this girl from high school. She got engaged a few years after they graduated, and he attended the wedding and smiled through the ceremony, then went back home and sat on the end of the bed with his head in his hands for a long time. It was beautifully shot. Wonwoo remembers that much. The light spilled over the bedsheets like water. You could see the man breathing but you couldn’t see his face.

 

— circles by miuyi (rainiest)

feels a bit odd to be writing a july roundup in the middle of august but in all honesty what did i do in july! school began again. swamped with work mostly. graduation is drawing closer and i'm not sure i like it. had a period of writing burnout and got myself out of it by writing a verkwan fic for a zine. listened to in my way by julia wolf so much at least 100 of those 2 million plays are probably mine. august is going fine but july felt like one of those months that sort of pass in a bit of a daze; i'm posting this even though it's so late to remind myself that i Did read things this month/remind myself of the passage of time etc etc.

enjoy what's left of august :")