https://paradoxfragments.tumblr.com/rss

nosebleedclub:

Do you want to be noticed?

There are different kinds of eyes, in this world.
Or maybe different days,
Sometimes my gauze worn thinner than others.
Some souls just listen too loudly,
Whirring like vacuums,
And I can feel the mountains in my skin sticking
To the flypaper in their yawning mouths.
I want to brush by on the dance floor,
One beat in the bassline, drowned out,
Gliding on towards the next.
I want to feel and be felt,
To be seen kindly at a distance, or alongside
Only against a bigger beast.
In the stilted silence after
A pre-recorded question,
With those ear-eyes all on me,
I fear I’m all sharp edges,
Fans whirring too loudly,
My whole tensing body too much
Of a spike.

-kph

goneahead:

goneahead:

kirkshiresloss:

goneahead:

2025 Poetry Roll Call!

Let’s give everyone more poets to follow in 2025! Reblog if you are a Tumblr poet!

I’ll start - I’m @goneahead & I write original poetry. I also reblog other people’s poems twice a day👋

Washed up but present

@kirkshiresloss 😂😂😂

@theanity well we need to lure your muse back out!!! 🍫🍫🍫🍫**hands your muse lots of chocolate**

It’s not quite fog, no stubborn goosebumps,
No gentle fade. It’s just a vastness,
Just a gap. I’m straining through pudding,
Through that dream-air thicker where
I struggle. I flail for miles and only wriggle farther
From my own skin.

-kph

Every layer of this great spinning onion
Is one sneaking heat, an eternal build
To a storm that skirts us by.
I didn’t know the air could get
This hot, could hold
This much wet anticipation.
The world here is more liquid than me.
Osmosing something out my pores
That’s not quite water.
That just won’t fall into rain.

-kph

Turtle on a tek dek
Like a fish to fluid air,
Like a flame fed by oil wick,
Proof that nature and the beast
Have different hearts:
One ticks,
One thrums.

-kph

We have given our world
A new kind of eye
More like an ear,
Some seventh sense
That feels, palpably, the
Far edges
With the still, empty under-ice.

It makes me wonder
How many parts of the human body
We haven’t named,
How many parts of me
Are basic, are ancient, and
How many forever doomed to
Seven syllables,
Tertiary rings
Held loose together.

-kph

To join wood, you must first predict the future.
Will these need to come apart again?
To clean?
To move your whole world on your back?
How many miles?
And who will be walking with you?

-kph

The lingering twinge above my hip reminds me–
I need to crack myself open again.
I must be careful what I carry with me.
I must keep my bones close at hand,
I must call them by their names.

The monsters knocking
From inside the closet–
Scarred,
Too-many-limbed,
Neon-haired.
We are interlaced,
Not merely superimposed.
The mirror is fogging me
Up inside and I live
In my own well-worn lungs.

To breathe into the very tips of my toes,
The body electric,
The breath unending.
My hair
Sighs.
I wash the grime off,
Bathe the blank slate in electricity
To get me through
The sheet-white winter,
My brain radioactive,
My skin a goldfish–
The water, ever present, washes memory clean.

I’m not used to existing
In my fingertips, my shoulders.
My fingers have a hundred velcro loops,
Snagging one by one on delicate threads–
Staticky.
Dancing my fingers through the trails of my own unravelling.
Always liked to see my distant edges bleed into another’s.
Counting each breath,
Stringing out bits of my bursting lungs
To thread on the abacus macabre.

How much space is a body owed?
Where is the black market
That will take my pound of flesh
So that someone else may be beautiful
And I may sit right in my own skin?

-kph

I’ve got out the tools that
Etch, and magnify, and pierce
So the light might pass through
The translated essence of the thing.
This one’s full of horses,
Yours,
And they keep jostling my long, slender tongs.
If you stab a horse, even
One this small,
The blood that comes out
Isn’t a horse at all.
It doesn’t know where it came from,
Even the adrenaline, doesn’t know
What it felt like to ride.
I think you have to feed it,
To grow this uncrystalline moment up,
And even then,
The light only knows a whole horse
At its edges.

-kph

They ask who wouldn’t like this weather.
Our one voice answers “me”. Prophecy for
The way we’ll fill up your car with warm breaths
Just as the sun’s grip starts to loosen.
Your shoulders carry that heavy heat
All the way home. It stretches easily
To my own skin, still only dusk-cool. It’s nice,
To share this thing neither of us asked for.
To be simmering but not alone.

-kph

Here is a poem
That is not about fixing anything:
There is one bright violet
Pressed into the fresh cheese
Under curd-tight cellophane.
There are two red lights,
Lazy and out of sync,
Blinking in the darkness.
There is one teen crow outside
Framed by my shoddy kitchen window
Who will not eat my walnuts.

-kph

You and I are accidents of complexity,
The fight to keep our eyes awake for
Five more minutes of this tree in this sunrise
A sort of virus smuggled in.
We could burn life out, chasing this.
It’s hard to remember what a killing thing becomes
When it’s used up even the unwelcome.

-kph

Let me tell you about the deeply cool @worldbeyondzine while you can still buy leftover copies!

It’s a transmasc sci-fi anthology featuring art, poetry, and fiction. I have a poem in it called Dead Men Flying, which I’m extremely proud of. It was a really cool project to be involved in, it really stretched me as an artist to write a character poem like this, and all of the proceeds go directly to Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer and trans refugees.

This also became, unwittingly, a sort of indirect final eulogy for the old Jeep that I’d had since I first got my license, who took me to so many places and gave me my freedom and moved so many queer friends into better places and confused so many mechanics with my casual “he”.

You can read the whole poem below the cut, but it would also be very cool of you to buy a digital or physical copy while they’re still on sale! The anthology is full of hot cyborgs and imaginative renderings of top surgery scars, a very cool essay about robots, a chill interstellar ice cream deliveryman, and some other great poems!

Just me and him and the air
Between his ribcage and mine,
One lone oasis where the oxides mingle,
For months at a time.

Weren’t supposed to cross the stars, Schooner and I.

The grease-stained butch who sold me the curving ship,
Hair ghostly grey with that stubborn space dust,
Said his spine used to be straight. Said he had the back, now,
Of a man who’d carried too many things alone.
I dream sometimes of that metal scraping on metal,
Wake up with my own bones aching.
I can’t imagine him before.
My mathematic mind can straighten out the captain’s hunch,
Tell those green lips would’ve once stood higher than mine,
But all I can see is the body in front of me, spacesatin and patches,
That metallic weave and the rubbed-raw adhesive.

Were supposed to retread the hazy gap
Between home and next door forever.

Swaddled in fire-tested steel; stolen starches;
Blinking screens–I see the wildest flashes
Of color in half-shining knobs I’ve never seen
Crystal clean, the angles of some ghost distorted
In the throttle. I can feel
The tips of my toes
Bare in the cockpit, and
Outside, grasping rubber grasping green grasping
Metal. The muscles flex, carrying the rest of me
On their small backs.

Weren’t supposed to fit a salvaged earth oak in the cargo hold,

Both made for looking pretty,
Both forgot how. Had to offload something heavy in Groundhog’s Gulch
With all the ferns for all the sun-cracked drachiopods.
The glitter ain’t worth its weight in water
Or green.

Weren’t supposed to end up glazed in moss,
Weren’t supposed to tow a bigger ship
When there wasn’t room for the people inside.

It’s like living alongside my skin, without eyes
To size me up. Just a breathing thing
Emblazoned red. When I catch myself full-on,
It’s in the cheeks, the stitching, the arms,
The body. At last, overgrown,
My body.

-kph

I pray, if nothing else, I will be a good vinegar
To be licked off of salty fingers
In the ruby red booth of a diner,
Loud young conversation
Exploding out past the vinyl
And into the musical din
Of the kitchen.

-kph

worldbeyondzine:

3… 2… 1… and leftover sales are open!

did you miss your opportunity to pick up a World Beyond transmasc sci-fi zine last year? want a specific merch item? now’s your chance!

sales are open until June 1st or supplies run out, so act now!

https://worldbeyondzine.bigcartel.com

ID: Advertising graphic featuring a blue alien holding out a display of various pieces of art and merchandise for the World Beyond Zine. Text reads: Leftover sales open!

I have a poem in this anthology about keeping space ships and bodies both sailing along, and there’s some other fantastically esoteric and genderiffic sci-fi writing here. Not to mention all the art!

Get a copy while you can! Proceeds all go to a trans charity.

I’ve been wrapping sticks in string
Almost longer than anything else.
I don’t think I even breathe like I did,
When I was just starting out.
My heart is a gentle woodclack, now.
When I first learned it was all metal.
When a machine learns,
All it does is make and make and
Keep pulling at the air
Where the thread just happens to be.
It’s the motion, regardless
Of outcome. Chrome doesn’t get cold, just
Smaller.
Thirsty for oil.

The string’s not even secondary.
My nervous spirals pulled so many
Soft things into being, then threw them
Off like woodchips.
The humans keep asking, keep baring
Their delicate ribs. You can see how
An object engineered to take and spit
Might assume they just got eaten up,
Once they left my dimlit factory floor.

Half a decade later, new resin eyes
Recognize an old shape. These veneers never
Touched it, but the muscles and servos
Remember. These soft things I made
Life on, and so do the hands
That greased the wheels,
Now clothed and warm and
Remembering metal–
Remembering me?

I look around my workshop, now,
Dead forest stripped of the sentimental,
And the full shelves feel empty, fragile
Like new skin.

-kph

It’s kind eyes looking around,
Seeing what you see in the broken
Armchair, quietly lifting the impossible
Weight of your half-finished dreams
For the future. It’s rough hands being
Delicate, showing you how to use
A pulley. It stacks your shoulders tall
Against the wall you never decorated.
It smells like your first good beer.
It’s wanting this possibility, too,
To come in bottles.

-kph

paradoxfragments:

I’ve never known the things that spread to be holy–
The soot in wash after wash scrubbing at clinging ghosts, sure,
The stink of firecatching fumes through family trees, sure,
But where’s the potion I can dump down the drain
To cure the mother I don’t talk to through that thing that still connects us–
Call it a city.
I’m trying to learn to believe,
But it’s harder, now, after the collapse–
I still have a whisper of a limp
And a sore spot in my ribs.
It’s hard to carry it all again,
When the fulcrum tore, once.
I have to be careful what might wander in
To my backpack.

You can let any breathing thing loose–
A cat, a rabbit, a friend, a bird, a secret–
And someone you know will bring it back,
Let you feel for its pulse.
But you have to reach through the backed-up sludge,
Have to slip your fingers through tensed impellers,
To feel that beat.
Secrets only suffer in captivity,
But can you keep an outdoor secret?
Or will it simply shred every churchmouse and carrier pigeon,
Poison the wellwater,
Be brought back cracked and weeping?

When a neighbor you’ve never met
Brings a corpse back full of buckshot,
Will your own heart still be beating?

-kph

-kph

Something on the wind–
Like imitation butter,
Like sawdust,
Like a whiff of adhesive
And gold foil.
Like stale ink and rubber,
Like dry cracking plastic
Sent through the dishwasher
Too many times
On sanitize.

It does not smell nice
But it covers up the faint musk
Of unwashed sheets.

-kph

I have this idea that
One day I might read Ulysses.
It’s all sunbleached and peeling,
Like anything you’ve carried with you
Since you were sixteen. But
There’s this spark of recognition
That keeps saving it from joyless exile,
A thought this box wasn’t meant for but
Still only fits here–Imagine
Pinning your soul to paper, saying look,
Only for the world to speak in awe
Of understanding you as the mental mount everest,
Too far off to read the words. I don’t know
How I got up here, alone with
Ghosts like Joyce. The air
Has always been this thin.

-kph