BreastMilk Magazine

BreastMilk:Collective Diary is an opportunity for humans to casually and anonymously capture their souls and share it with others. We collect unassuming poetry from people's diaries and publish it in its rawest form. A lot of times, this doesn't come in the format of a formal poem. It comes from the scraps in somebody's journal.

I was inspired to create BreastMilk at a dinner party I hosted with a few friends. Each guest brought their journal, and during dessert, flipped through it sporadically to share vulnerable prose scribbled haphazardly among the pages. The result was an unintentional poetry reading that gave us chills and left everybody in tears.

An example entry from BreastMilk

BreastMilk is a genderless project. All babies need breast milk. But, breast milk is sourced from the feminine. And every human has two parts of their soul, regardless of their gender: feminine and masculine. Or, as psychologist Carl Jung refers to them, the anima (F) and animus (M).

In Western society, we are living in an age of the dying yin. At the top of our value list are yang traits: producing, working, socializing, doing. And while these traits are necessary for a fulfilling life, they lead to discontentment when not paired with balanced yin energy. We lose our rich inner worlds of creativity, spirituality, sexuality, and emotion. We become detached from the beauty of our humanness, our being, our souls.

Yin and Yang

BreastMilk's mission is to feed the soul of humans by nurturing space to experience our inner feminine through connection, vulnerability, and feeling. This type of poetry is found in the seemingly mundane and ordinary. You may know Wendy Cope's famous poem, "The Orange":

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—

The size of it made us all laugh.

I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—

They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do

Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.

This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.

I did all the jobs on my list

And enjoyed them and had some time over.

I love you. I’m glad I exist.

The beautiful thing about this poem, and so many others, is that when you read it, you're like, I could've wrote that. I probably have wrote that. And yes, you have, you filthy literary genius. Your soul is made from the same stuff as the Greats. Send it over.*

A text that I received from a friend in college

*Submit through direct messaging @breastmilkmagazine on Instagram or our Google Form.

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