blaine tolentino

“She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. She … [was] famine, fire, destruction and plague … the only true begetter. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires before they withered … her body was a miracle of construction … She was unquestionably gorgeous. She was lavish. She was a dark, unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much … Those huge violet blue eyes… had an odd glint… Aeons passed, civilizations came and went while these cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon.”  (Richard Burton’s first glance at 19-year-old Elizabeth Taylor)

 photographs by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen

image by Hui Yi

photos by Elena Kholkina

chocolate from ho chi minh city (saigon), made by marou, packaged by da vinci’s ghost? photographed by jesus? a beautiful concept to navigate sugar-stress with, like eating from a table draped with ceremonial robes.

easy to want this lamp by Nosigner (Eisuke Tachikawa), inspired by the “Super Moon”, still catalyzing stray ecstasies in my psyche. with events in the natural world sporting such excellent monikers, i re-look at my trips to buy bread at “Star Market.”

thought i left my affection for typewriters by the wayside; done toting seafoam scripts from the pacific northwest, or lusting after ettore sottsass‘ incredible baby valentine

(typewriter by Present&Correct)

“The David Rockefeller Award is presented annually by Museum of Modern Art to an individual from the business community who exemplifies enlightened generosity and effective advocacy of cultural and civic endeavors.”

botanical portraits by Francis Ooi
(“What I see When I run”, Singapore)

reminding myself of the inherent beauty of laurels and, more magic, the natural occurrence of possible laurels in everyday life

it may be the [all but a set of sweaty twinks] fellini situation, but you do something to me, tito mouraz

you think the moth pivots aimlessly, like young love in parking lots (stairwells, porches); you think the sky bleeds blue, somehow more human; you are wrong; i dealt with you in the gauze of midnight’s highway light, my cigarette drawn like a gun, perched between knuckles; bright height, unshade the earth’s green grass and mock the moon for its many houses; my heart still inches over the tropics, skipping storms to oppose you, further away on the cool polar wrath of my wishing; pinned by the possibility of your sound coming toward my house, feet hiccuping soft-flat shivers, bouncing on my screen door

elaborate, strenuous, expensive beauty – unbought and rare-traded from my childhood trust; o perfect and terrible, high-high or something extreme; found the memory of all sad things and put them in a shrine function, told them to stay put and they did, prayed to them without a sliver of wind to make a misstep, how did this happen; i have something so good in you, so strange that i am a slave to it, couldnt regret it if i tried, couldnt cry if i were paid; the chance of us being distant, of looking at eachother in some new way, this would have never been a thing for me to choose three years ago when i wanted to own everything even the opinions of others; i am exhausted by the constant onslaught of things i always wanted and now have; put me in a bear trap and leave me for the lofty to nibble on as a mid-morning snack

do me the favor of opposing me; stuck-out me too far outside of myself and into the trees; and words, one of the last devices i have left to save me from this pit; the bank of our shared sorrows; hard not to empty myself and be as perverse as you need me to be; under tongue, over sea, do you remember that time i fell asleep on a catamaran and woke up on a manta ray eating phosphorescent orgies of micro-life; your rich taste covers me and i walk the block with a handful of wet-dog eyes grappling the pathway to outside

sure, i met you and then spent a long time trying to learn not to trust that you are correct, this is a common process and i should not feel bad; ylang ylang goes red when you leave it in your car – the life is exhausted from the mass and sticks to everything it can; read a few entries on the internet about how to make your own cloud in a 2 liter bottle, how do coral make cloud, how am i not a coral, how is coral more me than me, my own skin, my own nails; the ocean, a ghost from a time when i was so horribly open that i couldve been dragged into any firing range and left to grow some honor

broken by you put down and shouldered by you, all prepositioned you propositioned by you by my being too-near, you, focus in and in and zoom-trooping the pores in magnitude, unnerving, servitude o you, o clumsy you mooned by me and the possibility of me again, you and then me again like too-fast light flicking from a slit in a rotating lampshade meant to trick you into thinking it never left, the light it never left the light like the last crinkled sigh of a ship making home at the bottom of the sea

laugh when you peel your leggings off to show me a tattoo of a beaver; boom-rays sift-lifting off the pier, too much blue in this light; i dont, and still there is adjustment to unrefracted, untempered, unstoppable, cloudless clop of pure fucking light all over me; nordic times in your basement – making the spare eyelash of a heavy flashlight move across too many surfaces to do any good (light lost in a bushel of jackets, this strange weather enchant you from your trunk and closet); small world over here with roaches captaining spread-it squad across this bullshit paradigm

a dream where i give you strange permission to pull the keep off my hair and let it down in dollops; these days i sleep close to the river or at least the sound of the earth moving when no one is looking; we laugh about the benthic zone but i know that i store the smell of stress there – turquoise bust of caesar looking disdainfully at civic acts; im asked to be on paper, please be signed up and signed in, take this coat and make it protect you, do what youve always done but let them see it, let them take the thing you most-loved about the chance, the truest part of doing good (that it happened in secret); sometimes after a shower i shake like a dog and hope the air up-and-outs all the badges i keep to remember that i ever did anything right; God doesnt take the time to punish anyone with accuracy – it’s in waves – i have to kill that man – i will kill everything that’s ever seen his face

mute the tremble mute the echo mute unstrung mumbles mute the design mute the content mute the fragrance mute the climax; i try to balance the composition by taking out elements or adding light, but wherever the memory resides i recoil, i lose track of my residence in this time and give you everything from my pockets hamper and childhood; the sun’s gait pricks my skin – flumed beauty spots; i build you a house of my germs and once-inside-faceted (that-is-Planned) b-bust, a fevered b-burst; do you know how many moons i have? 4 and every damn one is full and asks for money like a glass of water on a hot day (i never resist); i am asked for my affiliation and i provide the most delectable tangent that could exist

i remember a time when you wanted all of my sacred things, you had a long list of objects you watched me press against my skin, from under my clothes, onto my bedstand; it doesn’t kill me to know you no longer crave these things, these manifestations of craving, your personal belonging (not mine); i thought it would, i thought i would decompose because the sun suddenly hated me; quite the contrary, it goes running with arms out into a place that i can’t access anymore; knowing that i can’t be there, in that place, to feel the pain of your absence gives me another complimentary pain, something less familiar and more burdensome; my language is becoming too middle-ground, i know it’s true when no one asks me to repeat myself; more pain; there is no struggle in this new world where i am not able to feel the regret and disdain i used to feel when i stood by the espresso machine glued to the void at 7am thinking about the hair by your navel or the gaps in conversation when i took the opportunity to jump you; there is no poetry here but it is more of a task for me to observe the expanse of this place; it is not the desert or the tundra, it is the thing i wanted to become and now am; it is not enough to hate it

“you are an exercise in futility” – remember the first time a girl said this to me, tonguing a molar, sitting in a milky-warm night on a park bench near the public pool, 15-so-unknowing so i look it up secretly when the night is over, i find myself making same-utterances under my breath to a non-love who won’t allow her mistakes to be approached, not this mammal with all kinds of history in the fur; crashing observances i-find-myself making cataclysms all on my own, in sensational repose outside of calculus on a cold morning; when will i stop remembering skin for all its glow, hair for all its vagrancies, smell fog-spread over the lake of me; make a promise and lie about it, better not to say anything but i cant stop myself

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