Thank God Or The Universe Or Whatever For Cycles And Seasons Though Like Yeah Life Right Now Is Unbearable.

- excerpt from the gentle version by sylvie

Pablo Neruda, tr. by Mark Eisner, "One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII", The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

Precious

The puppy is no longer young but he is still small and fits in the crook of my arm like a sleeping babe all sleep-warm and honey-slow blinking up at me with wide black eyes.

I hold his tiny face in my cupped careful palms press a kiss into the wisp-light fur at the nape of his neck and tell him like a vow: You are so good and so precious and so beloved.

And a soft, gentle thing in the cavern of my chest slowly rises to reply heartbeat-quiet: We are. We are. We are.

- by sylvie (j.p.)

my husband was at a bar with friends tonight and apparently he was telling the regulars about how we met because they didn't believe in real life meetcutes and he needed them to know it's possible 😭

I love eight year olds because no one else these days has the courage to lie blatantly to your face with the conviction of a sixth-century martyr

I want to go home. I just want to go home, I just want to go. Home.

So come home, said the voice from the stars.

Writing is from Grace by Kae Tempest

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it is november, and yesterday it felt like it was supposed to be snowing. in boston, november used a winter month, not a fall month. it is supposed to be chilly; rarely capping over 45F. it is a sweater-and-jacket month. it is a "maybe a scarf too" month. in my childhood, november meant blizzards and sleet.

it did not snow. tomorrow the weather predicts a high of 76.

i have spent so many years of my life studying the longterm possibilities of climate change - the culmination of capitalism wreaking havoc on the bodies of people, animals, plants - but every so often i am still shocked by something small and personal.

in a hundred years, when someone goes outside in boston - will they know the feeling of "snow in the air"?

i know it's a learned feeling, a sensation that maybe only longterm experience can teach. a few years ago, i was walking with my friend who had just moved up from the south. i said it smells like snow and she gave me this look like - what the fuck. i said it feels like snow too, which didn't help. she looked up to the bright blue sky and then back at me and then back at the sky. 12 hours later, we had 3 inches. you can just tell if it's going to snow.

except i can't tell, anymore. i stand outside in a tee shirt and watch my dog dance around a lake. we're in a drought and the skin of the water has peeled back twenty meters. the lake is tamed, quiet, puddlelike and sour. my pokemon go app warns there's a weather condition in my area.

my dog gets too hot from running and sits in the water and i want to laugh about his long frame and how awkwardly he sits - and i can't. some simian part of my brain is scratching the walls. it was supposed to snow. it was supposed to snow, but now it's warm instead.

during the last full solar eclipse, the dogs and the birds and the crickets went crazy under utter darkness. we laughed at them then, promising it will all be okay in a moment. but some part of me is still locked in that long night: some animal sensation.

something is wrong, my body says. i can't afford eggs or rent. i go outside to watch a sunset and listen to birdsong. i don't bring a jacket. allergies are killing me this season, allergies i didn't have as a kid. everyone comments that halloween has started to feel strange, offkilter. that it's hard having "holiday cheer." my body thinks it's april, and then it thinks we're in september, and then june.

something is terribly wrong, she whispers. go outside. it is supposed to be snowing.

"but there is something that happens when you are told you are too much. you begin to ask everyone, "how small would you like me?""