sarah xerta

YOUR LOVE FINDS ITS WAY BACK

Sun, 17 Jan 2016 19:54:14 -0500

sierrademulder:

One day, it just showed up on my doorstep.
Honestly, I don’t know how it found me again.

The last night we spent together, I lured it away

with a trail of breadcrumbs–a necklace
it swallowed one diamond at a time. Such a hungry

little bloodhound. I led it deep into the forest,

fastened its legs with twine. Dug a hole.
Said I will jump if you jump and it did

just like I knew it would. And now,

here it is again–on its submissive back,
its pink underbelly exposed—and I cannot say

I didn’t want this. That I haven’t waited

by the window. I sculpted your body
from the dust on the doorknob. I’ve hoarded

your name in my mouth for months. My throat

is a beehive pitched into the river. Look!
Look how long this love can hold its breath.

- Sierra DeMulder

This poem can be found in my forthcoming book Today Means Amen. Available for presale now! For every book ordered or purchased between January 2nd – February 2nd, my publisher Andrews McMeel Publishing will donate $1 to To Write Love On Her Arms, a non-profit which aims to present hope for people struggling with addiction, depression, self-injury and thoughts of suicide while also investing directly into treatment and recovery.

[excerpt] civil coping mechanism #poetry #love

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 00:41:10 -0500

[excerpt] civil coping mechanism #poetry #love

https://www.instagram.com/p/_59zvDGB5I/

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 22:35:14 -0500

https://www.instagram.com/p/_59zvDGB5I/

Photo

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 21:33:00 -0500

lineandstanza: Sappho, trans Willis Barnhart

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 20:45:09 -0500

lineandstanza:

Sappho, trans Willis Barnhart

"Snare of the shine of your teeth, Your provocative laughter, The gloom of your hair; Lure of you,..."

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 14:09:29 -0500

“Snare of the shine of your teeth,
Your provocative laughter,
The gloom of your hair;
Lure of you, eye and lip;
Yearning, yearning,
Languor, surrender;
Your mouth,
And madness, madness,
Tremulous, breathless, flaming,”

- Angelina Weld Grimké, El Beso (via viperslang)

I want to walk in the Light

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 13:38:49 -0500

I want to walk in the Light

bobschofield: THE STUFF OF LIFE by Bob Schofield

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 23:28:50 -0500

bobschofield:

THE STUFF OF LIFE by Bob Schofield

making myself “until I reach the pit” [Lispector]

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 21:53:43 -0500

making myself “until I reach the pit” [Lispector]

God/like

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:57:03 -0500

God/like

I made a new Instagram account, I’d be so happy if you followed me. I am excited to make photos...

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 10:21:30 -0500

I made a new Instagram account, I’d be so happy if you followed me. I am excited to make photos again/ write the light xo

@sarah_xerta

how my nerves steep into yr breath

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 09:29:33 -0500

how my nerves steep into yr breath

giganticsequins: 9 of the Best Books I Read This Year by Poetry...

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 23:57:46 -0500

giganticsequins:

9 of the Best Books I Read This Year by Poetry Editor Chrissy Friedlander

Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil

CITIZEN by Claudia Rankine

Patter by Douglas Kearney

NO: a guided meditation by Sarah Xerta

These Are the Gloria Stories by Kelin Loe

The Pulp Vs. The Throne by Carrie Lorig

Intersex by Aaron Apps

WAKE by A.T. Grant

no shame in saying that I re-read all of the Harry Potter books again for the billionth time, and THEY ARE STILL THE BEST.

okay now I am dying

Act I, Page 4

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 23:55:37 -0500

cancerclub:

“It’s the thirteenth day of spring and all the snow
is dirtier than it was yesterday. My teeth
are one day older and the sky
has another thousand molecules of cancer moving through it,
but my eyes have been dry,
and that feels really nice, in bed eating Oreos
like a normal person, my feet getting warm as my brain
softens and slips away from itself
like a moon, a sailboat, all the pretty things
we don’t know how to hold.
You asked me for a letter
and I sent you a star-shaped piece of my tongue.
You asked me for a letter
and this isn’t it. I’m sorry. I get so busy
thinking about you that I forget
to think about you. I imagine my insides
like a whole sea of sailboats
murmuring to each other in the dark,
and I wonder how many secrets exist on the Earth at any given moment,
what breed of flowers
will dig their roots into our graves, what shade of gold
is your breath when you dream?
You make me want to make stamps out of morning,
seal every envelope with a moan.
How many fibers of the universe have we given birth to?
Like this I am always wading through an orchestra, my hips
always brushing against some sort of glass, all these breakable
thoughts about God, the sun
in April, the sound you make when you look at me and don’t make any sound.”

-Sarah Certa: “JULIET”

Read the chapbook

paperdarts: The Wake Because life is hard I’ve been...

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 23:54:30 -0500

paperdarts:

The Wake

Because life is hard I’ve been sleeping
with my jaw clenched too tight, my tongue
jammed against the back of my teeth, my teeth
like a dam, keeping everything from
bursting out of my mouth like the broken
spring of a child’s Jack-in-the-box, which has to be
the cruelest toy ever invented. Its yellow melody rises
like fireflies, like God, the small sacs of pollen that sprout
from the insides of day lilies, only to moments later scare
the living fuck out of you, wrecking your stroll along the cotton
candy boardwalk of the daydreams
you’d only just begun, shattering
the very little sense you’d made of this world.

Read the rest of Sarah Certa’s poems here.

ra-dian-t: pg 1,2/?: just for one day I’d like a brain made out...

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 23:53:47 -0500

ra-dian-t:

pg 1,2/?: just for one day I’d like a brain made out of crystal/ a heart sewn from swan feathers, your favorite place to sleep-sarah certa

omg someone used my poetry in their sketch journal <3

"On the 75th day of spring I almost buy cigarettes because there’s hair in my apartment that didn’t..."

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 23:49:47 -0500

“On the 75th day of spring I almost buy cigarettes
because there’s hair in my apartment
that didn’t come from me,
and I don’t have enough quarters to wash the sheets tonight. I drive
past the gas station and think about all the dirt
in all the countries my feet have never touched. I keep driving and wish
I could keep driving until I reach the desert, a tribe
of women who wear lipstick
everywhere except for on their lips. I want
to press my nose into their armpits, be adopted
by rage, tear like a wolf through the slow
crawl of the funeral
procession that’s been eating up my spine
for the past five years,
slice away the devil’s forked tongue
wrapped around my ankles. Has he always
been there? Because I used to be young. I used to have a family.
I used to gather myself in my arms like a wild
bunch of daisies. I used to have arms
that didn’t look like ghosts, sad bag of bones
draped with skin that doesn’t
want to be skin. I used to grow
a garden. I used to grow
a body. Now I mix tequila with limes
and call it dinner, think all my thoughts perfectly
and hope no one dumps their babies in the river tonight.
I know that things fall apart,
but this is getting ridiculous, my brain like meat
giblets, falling piece by piece down the back of my throat
so that I spend most of my days choking or
trying not to. I keep forgetting
the bright faces of my friends. I keep forgetting
to dream. I’m writing this on my laptop
which is probably giving me cancer, all that radiation
coring me out like a coal mine.
I can feel it in my belly, a green tumor with teeth and
the tongue of a man
dressed up as a better man,
so now I don’t trust anyone in a suit or
wearing a smile that makes me feel important.”

- Sarah Xerta, “True or false?” (published in Ghostwriters of Delphi)

Your writing rouses the best and worst in me. Your voice is incredible and I'm so proud of you.

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 21:56:12 -0500

thank you so much <3

Photo

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 15:22:07 -0500

late night Love notes

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 00:04:23 -0500

some ppl confuse empathy and/or spirituality with hyper-optimism & I think this is dangerous. whether the hyper-optimism comes from a place of privilege or is itself a self-defense mechanism to keep their own painful emotions buried, when ppl respond to other ppl’s pain with hyper-optimism it often further invalidates that pain, which ultimately only leads to more pain. I view emotions as energy frequencies, ranging on a scale from high to low, so it only makes physical sense to me that low-frequency feelings, such as depression, for example, are not going to suddenly bounce up to the high-end range of the scale, & even if they did, this dramatic shift would be unpleasant & maybe frightening, forcing your energetic system to adjust from one polarity to the other. my own energetic system used to do this all the time & it was excruciatingly painful, known to some in the western psych world as rapid-cycling bipolar disorder and/or the rapidly changing emotions that often accompany the class of symptoms the DSM calls ‘borderline personality disorder’ (which I have a *very long impassioned theory about that I will maybe share at another time*). So anyway if someone is feeling on the low-end of the spectrum it makes sense to me to 1) validate those emotions! Emotions are energetic signals – they are telling us something, even the unpleasant emotions we would rather not hear from. We are energetic beings & exist in so many more multi-dimensional ways than our physical bodies. Low-frequency/painful emotions are messages that something is wrong, & some might say “well yes there is a lack of serotonin in the brain” but that still doesn’t answer *why* there is a lack of serotonin in the brain (and sometimes it has nothing to do w/ serotonin or the physical brain at all so neuroscience as the universal foundation for figuring out emotional pain really doesn’t cut it for me & also largely ignores or at least does not center the roots of trauma & sociopolitical oppression), & if you’ve been my facebook friend for a while you know I am all about getting to the root of things. which brings me back to my favorite topic: QUANTUM PHYSICS. I believe that feelings are composed of subatomic particles just like everything else in the universe, which means I believe that our feelings have a direct impact on the physical world simply because feelings are, at their subatomic root, already a part of the physical world. BUT – I believe it is dangerous to translate this into the idea that hyper-optimism is the key to transforming painful emotions into less or not-painful emotions (this is known as the cringe-worthy concept of “positive thinking” as the cure to all yr woes), because to do so is to ignore or resist the energetic messages those painful emotions are sending us, & it is **resistance to energy** that is most painful of all. I believe painful energy needs to be processed & before it can be processed it has to be recognized & validated, & to me recognizing & validating where people are currently emotionally at is the first step in extending true empathy. and this true empathy is, at an energetic level, the highest frequency of all!!! I call this highest frequency Love & it is so fine & so electric & so infinite & multi-dimensional that you don’t even have to speak it for it to do its work. it works subtly, beneath the surface of what we can see, so that when someone is in pain & you choose to empathize with that person instead of project hyper-optimism or what *you* think they *should* be doing/feeling, you are both meeting that person’s current emotional need, an energetic alignment which helps provide some energetic stability, (which is much healthier than jumping from low to high anyway), AND stirring up the subconscious or perhaps unconscious high frequencies of Love that will continue to do their work even after you are finished extending empathy. this is why when we are in pain we cringe when someone tells us to just “cheer up” or “snap out of it.” that cringing is a sign that their energetic vibrations are not what we currently need, otherwise their messages would feel good! often we know exactly what we need: someone who is willing to listen & validate us, which is why it feels so good when someone does. that good feeling is the subtle work of Love as we process our pain. we need empathy/ Love.

a lot of hyper-optimism comes from privileged New Age thinking that does not empathize with sociopolitical experiences outside of the status quo, which is partly because we are currently living in a global empathy deficit & it is exhausting & downright awful. yet somehow I have hope, & I swear that’s not hyper-optimism lol.

I love you. <3