7/5/2025

Reading Books at the End of the World

I originally wrote this for a hope-punk variety show called Joy Deficit. Every month’s show is themed. This show’s theme was “Books.” When I initially applied, I asked if I could read an older piece about finding my voice by reading aloud. Soon after, though, I realized I wasn’t done talking about the healing power of reading to someone you love. So I wrote a draft of this piece. I then tweaked some of the language and here we are. Things are bad. They feel impossible. But reading to my partners, to my friends, is a way I stay afloat. I want to do my best to honor that. This piece is my best attempt.

Yours with an open mouth,
-B


It is impossible now to look at the sky and see blue. The sky, every morning as I open my blinds and take my first frightened breaths, is red as blood, as orange as fire, as welcoming as hell. It is a fearful time to be alive and at the mercy of small men and towering engines of malicious capital. I feel tired and the sun feels like a stranger.

People I love are being evicted. People I’ve never met are dying in the dark. My heart creaks like sailor’s ropes to hold onto anything useful. I try to keep busy, keep my head down, keep the flames from licking my ears and most of the time this works. I am going to work. I am taking my pills.

I am performing in shows like this one. I am hanging out with artists, carving Algonquin tables out of vape smoke and streetlight. Sometimes this is enough. Other times I go home, and on the Uber ride back I check my phone and send my girlfriend a single text:

Chicken emoji. Two. Moon emoji. Question mark.

Hieroglyphs in cybersand asking a simple question:

“Cock tonight?”

For the last two months we have been reading Charles Willeford’s hard-edged novel Cockfighter about a man who raises chickens to fight. It is the fourth book we’ve read together. She lives three states away and this is what we have. Cockfighter’s protagonist has taken a vow of silence, refusing to speak until he becomes the cockfighting champion of Milledgeville, Georgia.

Sometimes after a long day of living as queer women in this American crematorium we are crackling, smoking, and speechless. We don’t want to talk about her engineering degree, or my day job, or what we can’t do for everyone we love. We don’t want to talk.

Even me with my ever-bursting dam of love letters. For all my words, for all my poems, there are some nights where I am a dead child’s bedroom, full of everything but what I was made for. In those times, we read. We carve silence out of someone else’s words and burrow into the negative space. We read books.

When we first started talking, we would send each other quotes from our favorite authors, dropping passages and poems in each other’s laps like cats with twitching birds. See what I’ve found for you. See what scrap of Sara Teasdale I have butcher paper’d my heart in today. I love you. So does Emily Dickinson. I love you, so does James Baldwin. We build a glossary, big as a house, furnished with a lovers’ cant whittled out of other people’s hearts.

Now we read books. We hide in thick paperbacks like contraband. We are contraband. We are a life’s savings slipped between the pages. We could burn down tomorrow and it will be the riddle of ashes to figure out what was more important, us or the books. Both are worth crying about.

When I moved back to Atlanta all my books fell off a UPS truck. All the books I kept through the divorce were strewn across some patch of asphalt between New York and here. Some of these books were out of print. Some of these books were signed by red-eyed authors at poetry slams Some of the books were gifts from poets who are dead now. Some things can never be replaced. There are days where I remember this, and weep.

Now I build better libraries out of my lovers, reading books and keeping them safe. I hurl trashy horror novels to Vermont. I hurl terrible fantasy to Louisiana. I make my bed with short stories. I slip my books into these glamorous loves like free libraries. We all take what we need. Reading aloud has become something necessary. It is the only way I know to keep people close from afar.

Ursula K LeGuin says books are bags- are sacks- are medicine bundles. They are how we hold things that will heal us, things that we must carry to continue on. Until we see each other, books are my hands, my teeth, my fluttering throat. They are how I hold her. They are how I cradle the gargantuan ache of loving someone with a briar of busy highways between us. I read to her, she listens. She hears a story. I hear her breathing.

This is a fair trade. This is enough.

And so I leave shows early. I leave parties before they start. I cancel plans. I call a woman I love and open our book to where we left off. Neither one of us can sleep, our bedrooms are driftwood in red oceans of panic, and the sky is on fire. Who knows what tomorrow has for us.

But tonight we have something. Tonight we are a chapter away from finishing Charles Willeford’s Cockfighter.

And then starting something new.

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6/27/2025