silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨

@silverhawthorne

writer, poet, editor (Liminality) burlesque producer & host (Viscous & Tingle) 🌈🦓, 🧶, freelance alchemist, ornamental hermit. habitat restoration as tikkun olam. AEW/ROH/NJPW/CMLL. 4’11”. Pagliacci. Firehose of news @silverlinks.bsky.social

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silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· 25d

Sonnet
By Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florists' shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops
And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made,—
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.
And now—unwittingly, you've made me dream
Of violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· 25d

Deconstruction
by Mary Ruefle

I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,
for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible,
than the story of our own life, the one we do not
want to hear and will do anything to listen to.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· 26d

The Undertaking
Louise Glück

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are—cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves’ goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,

the key is turned. Extend yourself—
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· 27d

Braved the eerie sepia smoke for a few garden pics. 🌱

The very top of a Joe Pye weed - abundant clusters of oval bulbs, with the very top just starting to bloom into fuzzy pink threads.

A little forest of silvergreen mountain mint, with its tiny white-and-pink speckled tubular flowers, like miniature foxgloves emerging from silver bracts. A bee is resting upside down, clinging to one bract.

Pink bee balm in various stages of bloom, all tall in the garden, against a backdrop of grey-headed coneflower with its tubular dark centers and sparse golden petals - also a copper obelisk stuffed with trumpet vine, and the burgundy foliage of ninebark.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jul 5

Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits
Rachel Zucker

tonight I'm cleaning baby portobellos
for you, my young activist

wiping the dirty tops with a damp cloth
as carefully as I used to rinse raspberries

for you to adorn your fingertips
before eating each blood-red prize

these days you rarely look me in the eye
& your long shagged hair hides your smile

I don’t expect you to remember or
understand the many ways I’ve kept you

alive or the life my love for you
has made me live

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jul 1

by Alison Lubar.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 16

The Thing Is
BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 14

JUNE
By Jason B. Crawford
_After Mark Bibbins_

Who wouldn’t have preferred a longer June; ’though
this seems trivial now in these milk-white lights. With June
comes Folsom East and Pride and waking up in someone
else’s bed and I am not really good at telling you these lies
so I will explain my sadness here; try to come clean. One June,
the rain fell nightly; felt like everyone had died. I understand
Sexton now, though I pretended I did before, tried to
grasp onto grief like a child holding onto their mother’s
thumb. It can be hard to wake in the middle of someone
else’s leaving. Impossible even to carry that burden.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 13

Twenty seconds of zen.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 12

The princess in repose, patiently waiting for me to finish my PT. Starla Jean Jacket Potato, of the Bacon Hill Jacket Potatoes.

A beautiful chihuahua regards you calmly from her perch on a dark green velvet pillow with a peacock and floral print. Said pillow is on a canopy bed with fairy lights wrapped through a quatrefoil headboard, with a backdrop of coordinating pillow and coverlet. To the viewer’s left, there’s a floor lamp with dusky pink fringe as a shade, and a long wrinkly rope of a hoya carnosa compacta. On her side and behind her is a tangle of passionflower vines; unseen, they form the canopy of the bed and a soft side curtain on the light side of the bed. Light shines through her perfect pink ears. She looks like she might have a quest for you.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 7

day three!

Same peony, open even wider - just an explosion of ruffly petals, with a slight ombre effect, lighter at the edges, darker pink approaching the center. Several vivid orange stamens peeking out of the center now!

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 6

day two!

Stunning pink peony opened almost all the way now, bright pink ruffled petals against bright green foliage

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 5

first peony of the season 💖

a gorgeous pale pink peony against a background of its bright green forking foliage. just absolutely crammed with ruffled petals. still opening.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 2

Guess I’m not doing the sit-to-stand part of my PT rn. Alphie veto.

A very large tuxedo ragdoll cat curled up on a caramel-colored velvet loveseat. He’s half on a teal velvet weighted lap blanket that’s draped over the arm, with a round pale pink velvet pintucked pillow behind him. The walls are dark green, with art and a green violin hung behind the cat, whose name is The Grand Duke Alphonse, but who often goes by Alphondigas (he is meatballs) and infrequently by Beef Thursday, Private Eye. He is glossy-furred and handsome and is resting his chin on a paw that hangs slightly off the loveseat, so you can see his ragdoll toe-tufts.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 2

i love you to the moon &
BY CHEN CHEN

not back, let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of
queer zest & stay up
there & get ourselves a little
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean
i was already moonlighting
as an online moonologist
most weekends, so this is the immensely

logical next step, are you
packing your bags yet, don’t forget your
sailor moon jean jacket, let’s wear
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,

queerer moon gravity, let’s love each other
(so good) on the moon, let’s love
the moon
on the moon

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Jun 1

Cat checkpoint!

A handsome flame-point Siamese (white cat with toast points) curled into a circle, tail tucked neatly, on a shaggy green blanket on a lap.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 31

POV: you just came in from gardening and your dog is insisting that you take a break. “You STAY, mama. STAY. Good stay, mama.”

A very concerned chihuahua (deer-head) holding her human in place with a single paw to their denim-clad legs, which are stretched along a green sofa and crossed at the ankle. She gazes deeply into her human’s eyes.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 29

ok but how??

Your Result:
trans guy who is absolutely CARRYING a dead fandom

this might seem too oddly specific even for me but listen my life has been saved by this exact kind of guy too many times to not include it. your fandom has 30 fics on ao3 and you wrote 22 of them (bonus points if you write good smut despite being asexual). you're on tumblr, twitter, tiktok, fucking *pinterest* practically evangelizing about a show that ended 20 years ago or a video game only a thousand people every played. and you're doing god's work, soldier.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 28

tell me why i ordered mugwort seeds and started them inside and refrigerated them two weeks as instructed and babied them into seedlings and i walk out to the side yard to check on the veggies and

A volunteer mugwort seedling, one of three that just showed the fuck up in a patch of flax and rudbeckia. Beautiful frilly leaves on this bitch.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 27

Winter sowing success! 🌱✨🎉 These are the most explosive of the nine jugs I’ll be opening to plant tomorrow.

Two translucent gallon jugs on a wooden deck; foliage is visible through the jugs and erupting from their mouths, baptisia in front and amsonia in back.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 20

Currently blooming: columbine (pictured), dogwood, viburnum, mock orange, volunteer black cherry, The Demon Rose, and more… coming soon, the ninebarks and penstemon and peonies and so much more. Me to a neighbor: “I love your dog!” Neighbor: “I love your garden!”

So many pink columbine flowers above their beautiful foliage! In the background: bronze fennel, goldenrod, hyssop, echinacea, and other foliage

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 14

Imaginary Conversation
by Linda Pastan

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 13

One Source of Bad Information

by Robert Bly

There’s a boy in you about three
years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometime it’s a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
``Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.’’

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want
To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· May 12

My lap, every night.

Seen from above: a white cat (Ron), a very large tuxedo cat (looks all black from this angle) (Alphie), and a blonde chihuahua (Starla Jean), snuggled head to head to head.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Apr 22

My hands deconstructed. (MRI Sunday.)

Seventeen silver ring splints arrayed on a golden tray, in the precise order they go on my hands. Also, five regular rings; three silver, two white gold.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Apr 8

there's people that are dying, kim

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Mar 23

Your minute of zen

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Mar 19

Frustrating day so far BUT I finally found a bed that my cat-bed-averse tortie loves! This’ll keep her out of the entrance to the litterbox enclosure - fewer fights with her siblings for access.

A tortoiseshell cat curled up in a grey-and-white felt cave bed. Background is a file cabinet covered with stickers and a shelf of craft books.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Mar 18

Starla Jean the Baby Bean -> Baby Bean -> Beb -> The Beb -> The Bebelina/The Bebecita

A cream-coated chihuahua in a pink harness blepping; background is a street lined with snowbanks.

silver, by the woods (they/them) 🍀✨@silverhawthorne· Mar 11

So many books these days are set in the Before Times. Today’s Starla Book Club is a return to 2007.