summersound
SUMMERSOUND
"On the windows/ our heat turns/ into droplets of water// and I know some things/ we will never get back."
— "Ripening," Simon Shieh
𓈒𓏸.°•
summerheat in everyone's insides.
city sweat can take you back to childhood countryside. your young lover can get too old, & yet not old enough. you can love the woman who made a girl of you. you can want to love the woman who made a girl of you. it is hard to write & carry silence. & you know, you do, that on the seabed there are many mad with waiting.
for the impenetrable girls. cw for implications of grooming & abuse
𓈒𓏸.°•
⋆˚꩜ 700-word micro kinetic novel
⋆˚꩜ made for toxic yuri vn jam 2
⋆˚꩜ made using internet janitor's decker
⋆˚꩜ color palette: sarahboev's purplemorning8
⋆˚꩜ photography & writing by me
Development log
- "ripening" + plain text ver.65 days ago
Comments
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Thank god for this oasis on wheels
That un/comfortably shelters
2 out of 5 000 000 and change.
How blessed it is to be deemed worthy,
of her tolerance.
- - -
The visuals capture the inhumanity of infrastructure not designed to support life under the changing climate. The text captures the helplessness of having your head above water for as long as your lover / benefactor / savior / lifeline deems it worthwhile. It is hard to be anything or do anything when a step out of line may sever your only means of survival.
i don’t really know what to say. I just sort of feel like I get it. all the tingling, the unwanted sensation, the creeping feeling of the slow violence of climate change that I don’t even fucking know how to express and so I don’t even try anymore, and then despite all that you have to try to actually live with and deal with the only people you have left to offer you any shelter from the world. sometimes they’re nice. sometimes they’re not. sometimes there’s conditions you just have to live with and you just have to hope you don’t fuck it up and that you don’t accidentally break something you weren’t supposed to break and fuck it up even more and why are you even here. why don’t you even think about why you’re here anymore. I don’t know. I just hope we’re okay.
i dunno. it’s been a long week for me. but this was really beautiful. thank you for sharing
thank you for all the sweltering thoughts.really love poetry. really wish there was more of it on the net. we did a letsplay of ur game if you would like to see. we also read some of what u posted in your dev log
https://archive.org/details/toxic-yuri-jam-2026-summersound
oh my god thank you so much ! i struggle to watch/see other people reading my stuff but this stream was so fun. i'd be interested too if you were to do a theory stream like you said ! <3
The photography, and image styling is so mesmerizing, it elevates the imagery of the poem Great job!
thank you so much for reading this story !! >_< <3
im not quite sure if i digested this work properly, but to me, this painted such a vivid picture in my mind of someone in the midst of processing the damage their groomer has done to them.
sweltering heat tends to make one reminisce on the past. it's strong imagery that very much left me feeling a hollow kind of nostalgia. given the reading, it feels fitting.
i love this, thank you so much :) i wanted to work in & through this sweltering oppressive heat for the swelteringly oppressive relationship with her groomer that our narrator still finds herself in
yo, great job. your use of color is awesome. i love the filters on your images too. the placement of the text interacts with the images well.
on the poem itself, im still mulling it over. its very direct but the word count is pretty low so theres still a bit of interesting fill-in-the-gap to do. these summers are hot and exhausting and in my friend group on especially hot days we say it gives everyone "random asshole disease", by ratcheting up the ambient rat trap stuff we're all stuck in - i caught myself thinking a lot about that at first as your poem took shape.
“random asshole disease” is an awesome way of putting it 🙂↕️ i’m usually not a prose person, so writing prose for me to later rework for kinetic interaction/ through fragmentation was a very interesting experience! i’m glad it still retained a bit of that poetic negative capability >_< thank you so so much for reading <3
The usage of Decker complements the poetry here. It’s like a snapshot into a genuinely harrowing relationship, but we are only left with just enough to imagine everything else. Wonderful work.
<3 thank you so very much for reading, the work of imagining, etc !
I really love how much is said with so precious little. The way that they're so close with such a dense nothing separating them is really gripping, I loved this!
thank you so so much for reading !! i'm very happy their closeness even "with such a dense nothing separating them" was felt ^_^
this was lovely, both the poetry and the photography! i loved the rumination on yous or rather YOUs, the YOU of any particular work is always interesting to explore. well done!!!
thank you so much! when i wrote that section, i was thinking of madeleine cravens' essay on queer epistolary poems + how easily poems become containers for correspondence via direct & intimate engagement with the YOU.... she brought up siobhan phillips' work re: james schuyler 🔄 delineative criteria that sets epistolary poetry apart (if it does) from poetry that engages the YOU: "a specificity of address, an acknowledgement of the poem’s materiality as an object, and an “ineradicable distance” between the speaker and the addressee." i don't have it all worked out but i'd like to think our narrator's poems are also, functionally, letter poems in that regard, thus her hesitation to let susu read them :)
oh thanks for the leads on this topic! it's funny, our submission was genuinely one-half an epistolary work, and inspired by epistolary poetry (in our case, largely Bernadette Mayer's Desires of Mothers), but the letters themselves were not written primarily as poems (barring a few exceptions). that said they do meet that criteria to a lesser or greater extent... i think we're going to continue to explore this since it's an area we don't quite understand yet lol.
that said i can certainly sympathize with the narrator's hesitation to let susu read her poems... i've found even when i am not necessarily writing about someone or to someone, if they're on my mind when i'm drafting or revising, it's not always something i want them to see. or at least i'm aware of it being very vulnerable to let them see.
writing is definitely so very vulnerable no matter how much or how little of the personal you consciously inject into it i've found >_< but omg bernadette mayer.... queued up your VN the second i read this & i am so excited to sit down with it !
i'm glad to hear it and hope you like it! (although given the content i do not begrudge anyone if they don't click with it). she was probably like the first poet we really glommed onto, and we have a lot of fun doing exercises to see what our spin on her voice is, and we do wanna try and do more of that along the lines of Desires of Mothers and the journals that resulted in Studying Hunger. her stuff to us is like getting to see inside a person's brain in real time lmao
its amazing how much can be said with so little words. what beautiful poetry and look into these twos' lives. thank you for making this!
thank you for reading, thank you for your care ! 🪼🪼
wow. truly amazed how carefully this was crafted. the heat to the pool is a powerful, heartbreaking contrast. amazing!
thank you so much for reading :) i wanted this to feel very very humid, & pools in summer have always felt suffocating to me, in part because of that false contrast where they only momentarily cool you down as the sun shines down on you still - i'm glad the contrast got across !! <3
Extremely poignant. Loved the photography.
thank you so much!! i had to repurpose some shots etc due to time constraints so i'm glad :)
There was this moment during the novel where they both sit in the car for hours saying nothing to each other. That moment hooked me.
I feel like I know nothing and everything about these two.
Thank you for the beautiful read!
thank you so much for reading <3
oh dear i'll have to read so much more of your work
thank you
thank You so much for reading !! ♥️♥️
this is genuinely haunting
the setting hits really close to home as well. in a time where everything is trying to burn you alive and consume you, the worst thing is having the comforting warmth of someone you trust end up becoming worse than the blazing sun
or colder than the darkest winters. it's terrible
thank you for this !
it is terrible...! it's winter in australia & i'm heaterless & shivering so it was an interesting experience writing this. thank you so so much for reading !! <3
i hope you may be greeted by warm drinks and comfy blankets soon...