I am ruined

Sometimes looking at enough inspiration photos for a project alters your perception beyond repair, images so achingly pretty they snag on your eyelids and reverberate off everything you look at, seep  into words on a page so every A is a majestic igloo rooftop that perpetuates the spell and all letters that follow form a horizon of frosty treetops, backdrop to a faraway land, languid wonder of childhood folktales and fairy tales.

Poetry of Criticism

"Baudelaire: Art Critic"

 by Alfred Werner

This, a million times over.
What I'm struggling with, remember? Because why should the inspiration behind something end with it? Designers can be inspired by words, writers can be inspired by image--there is no reason for walls to be driven between the various art forms, and definitely no reason for a review to be devoid of imagination. Criticism as an art in which the writer looks at the subject to be reviewed and then traces what it stirs in him, without placing borders on where the response to the work takes him, this would be worthwhile and interesting.

The more I grow, the more I feel like a child.

Running On Ceilings

Longing long locks for a while now. The way the waves concealed my torso while two pieces I cut to make weightless framed my face...I want to recreate the image even if the moment has crystallized but when I look into the mirror the body of waves takes up less space on my back while the pieces around my face that I tuck cruelly behind my ears are too long and frazzled at the edges. Time has flipped everything but who gave it the right while people are deemed foolish for wanting to perform the reverse?

why do we call them stories if what we feel is real

"I looked up at him. I noticed for the first time the lines around his eyes, how his left one seemed to droop into a crevice. Above my father, the branches of the live oak played against each other and then were stilled. I looked at my father for a long time like that, his face framed by those branches and the blue sky beyond."

-Ana Menendez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

It's amazing how someone can write something based on their father, and if there is love there, the reader will always be filling the space where words end with an image of his own father, so what you get in that moment is the sketch of a figure that is simultaneously parent to both. Reader and author become related, connected, by the strange alchemy of words. 

What did I say about worlds being intertwined

     "He led her around the dance floor lined with chaperones, and when they turned he whispered that he wanted to follow her laughter to the moon. 

      She laughed again, the notes round and heavy as summer raindrops, and Máximo felt his fingers go cold where they touched hers. The danzón played, and they turned and turned, and the faces of the chaperones and the moist warm air--and Máximo with his cold fingers worried that she had laughed at him. He was twenty-four and could not imagine a more sorrowful thing in all the world. 

      Sometimes, years later, he would catch a premonition of Rosa in the face of his eldest daughter. She would turn toward a window or do something with her eyes. And then she would smile and tilt her head back, and her laughter connected him again to that night, made him believe for a moment that life was a string you could gather up in your hands all at once."

-Ana Menendez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

Spring or Something Like It

While I was running, my eyes landed on gold letters embossed on a black mailbox. The picture plane jutting in time with my stride made them read like Gatsby. I ran to the end of the block and did a three sixty, slowing to run in place when leveling with the mailbox. Gazety, it read. Russian for newspapers. It's so funny how our worlds are intertwined.