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reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Reality Sandwiches
@reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
340 followers 1.3K following 130 posts
Hi, I'm Kat 🌝✨Activist. Lawyer. Musician 🎻🎤 Synth nerd 🎹 Wonderer/Wanderer. Silly Billy. Book devourer.✨ 💚 Digital Rights. Copyleft. Privacy. FOSS. 📖 Universal access to all knowledge || Writing abt stuff I'm making, reading & listening to.❤️♾️ 🌈 || ✊🇵🇸🇨🇩🇾🇪🇸🇩
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reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Feeling really sad this week. About the world. About labouring under capitalism. About the passage of time. About regret. About death.

Being human is a lot.

Finding small comforts in books, art, the bush turkey building his mound in my backyard, comforting fried rice and music, always music.
Scientific drawing of Purple Martin birds on a card with a cut-up collage poem printed over it: hope is a motion of the heart fastened with courage not a feeling or idea but a choice a choice not to suffer the shortness of sight that is despair a choice to live in harmony with time for time is tenacious and never finished and in its peaceful labours far more prodigious than us at imagining the next great astonishment
November 13, 2025 at 11:36 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
My god. As a high-achieving perfectionist who also did Ancient History in senior; if this had happened to me, I probs would have had to be committed from the extreme stress of the situation. Good thing I'm not like that any more he he he.
November 1, 2025 at 2:45 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Morning meditation
A card with a scientific illustration of two Great Bowerbirds on a tree branch. There is a cut-up collage poem printed on the card that reads: find great interest in the regions of each other never visited by, common rambles the remote continent of shyness tinged, with hesitation observing kindly the peculiar furrows of need discovered in the expedition
October 9, 2025 at 11:04 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
I cannot find the author of this poem, but it's evocative and lovely and sums up life lately.

"Your eyes open a door and mine follow through."

#Poetry
we are walking through this world and it feels like an exhibit. you, who stops in front of everything. me, who learns to see because you do. a bird, a light, a tree with an unusual shape. curious. the world is heavy, then, less far away. your eyes open a door and mine follow through. maybe this is all it takes, to walk beside you and yet somehow leave different, like i've been handed back a part of myself that knew how to wonder, once. everything becomes enough. and everything becomes more. maybe there should be a name for this. the way things change shape when someone shows them gently. 1 could call it kindness. i could call it wonder. i could call it joy. but maybe it's simpler than that. maybe it's just this: your hand opening the world, and mine, never letting go.
October 7, 2025 at 2:39 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Violin practice facing constant disruptions this weekend. Every time I sit he scrambles straight into my lap for snuggles. 🥹

#CatsofBluesky #PetsofBluesky
October 5, 2025 at 4:46 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Carol Ann Duffy - Words, Wide Night.

#poetry #CarolAnnDuffy
Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon. This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear. La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you. For I am in love with you and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.
September 14, 2025 at 7:38 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
I celebrated #StarTrek Day with a 3:30am blood moon eclipse viewing & re-watching some of my fave Lower Decks eps curled up in bed.

ALSO, I received this for my birthday this yr & couldn't put it down, so I'm sharing a few excerpts from Nana Visitor's brilliant book, 'Star Trek: A Woman's Trek'.
September 9, 2025 at 12:45 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
“Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”

bell hooks, 'Eating the Other'
August 31, 2025 at 2:38 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Sleeping - Jane Hirshfield
SLEEPING by Jane Hirshfield Here, we are one geography: every part of us inked on a map where, across all the blue waters, continents' edges inexplicably match. I move closer to you in the dark, feel the slow heat that embers you deeper into the night. Where all fires descend a few hours into their own slow-dreaming hearts. Where the ravine hides in its own steepness no matter how long, how hercely we love.
August 30, 2025 at 12:43 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
After Making Love in Winter - Sharon Olds

I love the way she plays with pace in this poem, making the words move and pull and push at the edges of the sentences, the way two bodies do.

#PoetrySky
AFTER MAKING LOVE IN WINTER - by SHARON OLDS At first I cannot have even a sheet on me, anything at all is painful, a plate of iron laid down on my nerves, I lie there in the air as if flying rapidly without moving, and slowly I cool off-hot, warm, cool, cold, icy, till the skin all over my body is ice except at those points our bodies touch like blooms of fire. Around the door loose in its frame, and around the transom, the light from the hall burns in straight lines and casts up narrow beams on the ceiling, a figure throwing up its arms for joy. In the mirror, the angles of the room are calm, it is the hour when you can see that the angle itself is blessed, and the dark globes of the chandelier, suspended in the mirror, are motionless-I can feel my ovaries deep in my body, I gaze at the silvery bulbs, maybe I am looking at my ovaries, it is clear everything I look at is real and good. We have come to the end of questions, you run your palm, warm, large, dry, back along my face over and over, over and over, like God putting the finishing touches on, before sending me down to be born.
August 15, 2025 at 1:05 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
The Thing Is - Ellen Bass
Text of poem: '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.
August 10, 2025 at 12:28 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
It reminds us that abolition is both an end goal & a mindset: “abolition isn't just the tearing down of a carceral archipelago, but rather is the building up of ppl & communities thru constellations of resources, support, accountability & restoration of r'ships w/ place, ppl & other living things.”
Highlighted quotes from a section of the book, that read: "White supremacy sustains itself as an evergreen and powerful tool of exploitative capitalism" "It demands that individuals attempt to survive on their own, without the social and emotional supports of family (economic support is permitted, but within white families only). For example, Palestinians displaced by US-backed Israeli colonization find themselves transitioning from extended family formations that facilitate coparenting to isolated US households. On displacement to the United States, they find themselves in a culture that expects parents to rear their children with limited support, while also parenting kids who have survived colonial violence and trauma, on top of having to work longer hours. In eliminating horizontal bonds and obstructing collective coparenting, white supremacy also hides this structure of violence by attributing the harm as a failing inherent in those who now lack these support systems. It then further devalues, dehumanizes, and criminalizes anyone who dares to stumble. By reducing parenting to relationships between two heteronormative adults and their biological children within an isolated nuclear family, white supremacy weakens horizontal connections among communities that might otherwise exist. White supremacy thus organizes our homes using the same structures it uses to organize and manage society and society's social problems, through relationships of control and the normalization of containment, discipline, and punishment."
August 9, 2025 at 10:06 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
This month, the Radical Reading Group I'm part of is reading "We Grow The World Together." It's a powerful anthology on abolition parenting and caregiving, full of wisdom and heart and generously shared (un)learnings about our relationships with our communities, children and selves.
Photograph of the front cover of the book "We Grow The World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition" edited by Maya Schenwar & Kim Wilson. The cover has a bright, colourful illustration of an abundant garden with flowers and radishes and nasturtiums and sunflowers. The title of the book is written in bold uppercase white text.
August 9, 2025 at 10:06 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Green Apples - Ruth Stone
Green Apples - Ruth Stone In August we carried the old horsehair mattress To the back porch And slept with our children in a row. The wind came up the mountain into the orchard Telling me something; Saying something urgent. I was happy. The green apples fell on the sloping roof And rattled down. The wind was shaking me all night long; Shaking me in my sleep Like a definition of love, Saying, this is the moment, Here, now.
August 1, 2025 at 1:21 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
How do you say thank you and goodbye to someone who held you with their words more times than you can count during long stretches of darkness?

Who whispered reminders in your ear that it gets better, even when you couldn't remember or even comprehend what better feels like.

Thank you Andrea. 🍃❤️‍🔥
July 16, 2025 at 1:31 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
How do you say thank you and goodbye to someone whom you never met, yet saved your life?

#andreagibson #poetry
INSTEAD OF DEPRESSION try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don't even dream. It's okay if you can't imagine spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave. -Andrea Gibson Yeah, there were times we were both half-in and half out the door but I never needed more than the stars of your grin to lead me home. For fifty years, you were my favorite poem id I'd read you every night knowing I might never understand every word but that's okay - 'cause the lines of you were the closest thing to holy l'd ever heard. You'd say, "This kind of love has to be a verb. We are paint on a slick canvas - it's gonna take a whole lot to stick but if we do, we'll be a masterpiece." And we were.
July 16, 2025 at 1:31 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Meant to be waiting for my sister at our designated spot, but the pull is too strong.... I'm sorry Maddyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, forgive meeeeee.

#anthropology #museum
July 14, 2025 at 4:02 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
This poem undoes me completely every time I encounter it.

#Poetry #MarieHowe
The Kiss by Marie Howe When he finally put his mouth on me- —on my shoulder- —the world shifted a little on the tilted axis of itself. The minutes since my brother died stopped marching ahead like dumb soldiers and the stars rested. His mouth on my shoulder and then on my throat and the world started up again for me, some machine deep inside it recalibrating, all the little wheels slowly reeling then speeding up, the massive dawn lifting on the other side of the turning world. And when his mouth pressed against my mouth, I opened my mouth and the world's chord played at once: a large, ordinary music rising from a hand neither one of us could see.
June 28, 2025 at 7:28 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Excerpt from 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder, with gorgeous illustrations by Nora Krug.

John Lithgow also does a brilliant reading of this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXR5...

Read it. Buy it for yr friends. Leave a copy on a park bench.

#OnTyranny #BookSky
June 20, 2025 at 1:13 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
My Dead Friends - Marie Howe
Poem: My Dead Friends by Marie Howe I have begun, when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinion and the answer is often immediate and clear. Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child in my middle age? They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling —whatever leads to joy, they always answer, to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were-it's green in there, a green vase, and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes. Billy's already gone through the frightening door, whatever he says I'll do.
June 19, 2025 at 11:08 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
One of my favourite spots for afternoon walks in the winter. Walking amongst the dead, that Hemingway quote about dying twice often pops into my head. So I like to say their names out loud. Sometimes I tell them something about my day, or what's in my heart.
Photo of old, weathered gravestones. One of the graves has a latin cross. A wall of hoop pines form a backdrop to the graves, with golden afternoon sunlight glowing through the spaces between the trunks of the trees.
June 15, 2025 at 12:58 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
On Sunday's we march in protest, and we will march every Sunday until our government commits to stop supplying materials to the IDF.
Poem - Footnotes for Gaza by Sara M Saleh What are words when l've never seen so many organs spill onto my screen, into my palm? How does one write about hospital-shaped graveyards? Are bulldozers meant to crush bone? How do you count the dead, let alone identify them? What is 'resilience' when children are skewered on flag poles, their eyes wide open. When a Gazan man desperately digs up his own daughter? She dies an hour later. What are words when ambulances and aid workers are riddled with seventy-five bullet holes? What are words when poets are assassinated? What's the word for a son who refuses to leave his mother's tombstone? He hasn't stopped talking to her since. No words, no euphemisms, no metaphors, no slogans, no semantics, no ALL-CAPS captions, no headlines, no soundbites, no analogies are enough. Gaza will not be your glossary for a genocide. Gaza is more than a poem.
June 15, 2025 at 2:45 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
To Drink - Jane Hirshfield
To Drink by Jane Hirshfield I want to gather your darkness in my hands, to cup it like water and drink. I want this in the same way as I want to touch your cheek— it is the same— the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass; the way a horse will lower its long head to water, and drink, and pause to lift its head and look, and drink again, taking everything in with the water, everything.
June 14, 2025 at 12:24 PM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Ellen Bass - Sleeping With You
#poetry
Poem: Sleeping With You by Ellen Bass Is there anything more wonderful? After we have floundered through our separate pain we come to this. I bind myself to you, like otters wrapped in kelp, so the current will not steal us as we sleep. Through the night we turn together, rocked in the shallow surf, pebbles polished by the sea.
June 13, 2025 at 11:39 AM
reality-sandwiches.bsky.social
Delphiniums in a Window Box

by Dean Young (from 'Fall Higher', 2013)

#poetry
June 8, 2025 at 4:22 AM