May 2013
10 posts
3 tags
Jeffrey McDaniel, "Absence"
On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet, as I drop a postcard in the mailbox and watch it throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes are so green – one of your parents must be part traffic light. We’re both self-centered, but the world revolves around us at the same speed. Last night I...
6 tags
2 tags
Jimmy Fallon
internetlucy:
I saw you in the distance or did I see a strange and beautiful fish and assign it to your body by accident I am more tired than most women I have cried in numerous bathtubs I want to skip ahead to the part that is funny I want this to be that already instead of whatever part it is instead Outside the church, there is a poster of a bus full of nuns advertising their life of...
2 tags
7 tags
i pull on my old underwear the light pink pair with white lace trim and every time i do i still remember that day (just over two years ago now) we were smoking weed on your brown leather couch napping away our hangovers me in my short grey dress with some white socks i borrowed from you for my cold feet the socks were so bright white against my tan legs and i woke up to you behind me pulling this...
2 tags
2 tags
untitled / false spring
aleashurmantine:
The cherry blossoms have been curling in on themselves, skeleton hands, leaving a hazel carpeting on the sidewalk, so you drive. Here is movement you can control, a wheel that turns only when you let it. Here is a hard shell. Here is an embrace that doesn’t ask questions. Right on Belmont, thirty blocks toward Mt. Tabor. Climb uphill without noticing the incline. You...
1 tag
2 tags
Christina Davis, "Advertisement for the Mountain"
There are two versions of every life. In the first one, you get a mother, a father, your very own room. You learn to walk, which is only done by walking. You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger. You learn to ask almost anything is to ask it to be over, as when the lover asks the other “Are you sleeping? Are you beginning to go away?” (And whether or not you learn it, life does...
7 tags
April 2013
13 posts
2 tags
Jack Gilbert, "Going There"
Of course it was a disaster. The unbearable, dearest secret has always been a disaster. The danger when we try to leave. Going over and over afterward what we should have done instead of what we did. But for those short times we seemed to be alive. Misled, misused, lied to and cheated, certainly. Still, for that little while, we visited our possible life.
2 tags
2 tags
“Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a...”
– Margaret Atwood (from “Circe/Mud Poems”)
2 tags
Stephen Dunn, "Each From Different Heights"
That time I thought I was in love and calmly said so was not much different from the time I was truly in love and slept poorly and spoke out loud to the wall and discovered the hidden genius of my hands And the times I felt less in love, less than someone were, to be honest, not so different either. Each was ridiculous in its own way and each was tender, yes, sometimes even the false is tender. I...
1 tag
5 tags
Fleur Adcock, "Advice to a Discarded Lover"
Think, now: if you have found a dead bird, not only dead, not only fallen, but full of maggots: what do you feel - more pity or more revulsion? Pity is for the moment of death, and the moments after. It changes when decay comes, with the creeping stench and the wriggling, munching scavengers. Returning later, though, you will see a shape of clean bone, a few feathers, an inoffensive symbol of what...
2 tags
2 tags
Brenda Shaughnessy, "You're Not Home, It's...
I am calling to wish you well. I am calling because I want to change something I said. A year ago you asked me three questions. I thought you were asking my birthday wishes and answered all wrong. If you remember (if I know you you’ll pretend you don’t) I answered: 1) No, I have always been homely. 2) Yes I believe you have always been too lovely for anyone to bear. 3) Silk. It is not...
2 tags
3 tags
Clementine von Radics, “To Girls Like Me, With...
Darlings, sometimes love will come to you like a fire to a forest. When it does, be braver than I was. Just leave. Take only what you can carry. No tears, no second thoughts. You have hands like tinder boxes, the smallest spark will kill you.
Get in the car. Take water to the maps. Avoid gas stations. Don’t look at the flames dancing in the rear view mirror. Go to new cities, climb on the...
5 tags
5 tags
March 2013
13 posts
2 tags
Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who...
1 tag
2 tags
Leonard Cohen, "My Time"
My time is running out and still I have not sung the true song the great song I admit that I seem to have lost my courage a glance at the mirror a glimpse into my heart makes me want to shut up forever so why do you lean me here Lord of my life lean me at this table in the middle of the night wondering how to be beautiful
2 tags
2 tags
Richard Brautigan, "The Beautiful Poem"
I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking about you. Pissing a few moments ago I looked down at my penis affectionately. Knowing it has been inside you twice today makes me feel beautiful.
3 A.M. January 15, 1967
1 tag
3 tags
Melissa Stein, "Love Letter"
I don’t know when the boys began to walk away with parts of myself in their sticky hands; when loving became a process of subtraction. Or why, having given up what seems so much, I’m willing to lose even more — erasing all this body’s known, relearning it with you.
4 tags
7 tags
2 tags
Kristine Ong Muslim, "Making Rounds"
Nobody complained when we began to sever our hands so that the next generation would understand how the hands could incapacitate us. Washing them could not make them clean enough. It was bliss: finally, the excuse not to touch. We were taught to use our eyes alone; the texture of things was the first natural line of deception. The machines came and went, took good care of us. We used our voices to...
3 tags
2 tags
Jonathan Harris, "Odette"
The day behind her curled in the glow of the bedside lamp I don’t disturb this movement toward sleep. It’s how I’ll go too after those quiet hands leaf through the book after her chin goes under her eyes flutter closed. What would I say anyway? Why turn back? The perfume of poetry measures her breathing the pulse in her neck. I hold her lovely face up to my eyes and come level with a river that...
1 tag
February 2013
12 posts
4 tags
Bright Eyes - “Lua”
but what’s...
2 tags
Mindy Nettifee, "7 Things I Never Told My Older...
1. if you ever feel like leaving him, renting a rich blue convertible and becoming someone else somewhere in the desert, i’ll go with you 2. thank you for all the horrible and/or dangerous things you did first, so i could learn from your mistakes. specifically: getting herpes, dropping out of school, getting a trendy dream catcher tattoo. 3. i dropped acid with your ex-girlfriend. 4. remember...
aleashurmantine asked: happy birthday you GORGEOUS human being. i didn't get anything in the mail on time but soon, soon! i wish i was at yr surprise party <3
4 tags
3 tags
entangled love
greatnesslieswithin:
when i find my breaths increasing in weight from thoughts of the endless space between you and i, i can only be calmed, my bride, with our unequaled truth: that though we do lay apart, our spirits have melded to a single soul; so as i whisper these thoughts whole to myself of love and all other passions, thus you hear and know the fashions of every vast syllable i mutter,...
3 tags
Insomnia Poem
aleashurmantine:
February arrives, restless. Tonight runs its icy fingers through your hair. You are recalling autumn, picturing yourself once again with the last man. His laughter in the movie theater. His crooked grin, the lovely tundra of him. You know he has hands, but you can’t picture them. They must be large. He has large, rough hands. He plays a jazz record. He holds ...
1 tag
2 tags
Keetje Kuipers, "The Extinct"
Imagine I’m the last woman on earth, the snowiest plover, the loneliest
deep-sea-swimming whale. It’s not my fault, but it might be. Should I keep changing until
I become something that has an other? I’ve tried that. What else can I do for love?
Now not even the gray wolves listen to my long litany of failures. They know I’m just
putting this self-sadness in my...
4 tags
“listen, as the king of folk punk…”
– paul baribeau, just now
3 tags
Derek Walcott, "The Fist"
The fist clenched round my heart loosens a little, and I gasp brightness; but it tightens again. When have I ever not loved the pain of love? But this has moved past love to mania. This has the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of unreason, before plunging howling into the abyss. Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.
January 2013
21 posts
1 tag
3 tags
Emily Lloyd, "Things I Haven't Felt"
Different, after losing my virginity.
Better, after the medicine I took.
Mosquitoes on my skin, before they’ve bitten me.
Profoundly changed, after I read that book.
The call of the wild. The glow of pregnancy.
Guilty, after sleeping with someone’s wife.
High as a kite, high even as a tree.
The peace that passeth understanding. Safe.
God’s presence in the world, and that of the boy
who...
