she said, rightly @500pounds - Tumblr Blog

Bring me your pain, love. Spread it out like fine rugs, silk sashes, warm eggs, cinnamon and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me the detail, the intricate embroidery on the collar, tiny shell buttons, the hem stitched the way you were taught, pricking just a thread, almost invisible. Unclasp it like jewels, the gold still hot from your body. Empty your basket of figs. Spill your wine. That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it, cradling it on my tongue like the slick seed of a pomegranate. I would lift it tenderly, as a great animal might carry a small one in the private cave of the mouth.

Ellen Bass, “Basket of Figs”

lunchboxpoems

You firestar. Pool of moonburst. You turned my skin to dust. Rawblade glasstooth girl. With your hot rage and bus ticket anywhere. Never saw a woman run so many directions at once. One night, you shined so bright the police came to watch. Your bruises and shirt-shreds. How we all just stood there, watching you shimmer. Afraid to flinch, for a faceful of claw. You are some kind of firework. Flipswitch blues. Broken Sundays spent towing the boulders out of you. The Brooklyn 3am’s, frenzied as an upturned autobahn. Your porchlamp laughter. The clack and sweep and throb. The buttered slick of you. Your sweat-bead banshee pitch. Mother warned me. Said your sugar was a ruse. Bait. (As if madness is calculated.) I am the cruelest kind of lover. A coward. Afraid of the thing most dazzling. I wished the bleak into my own blood. Prayed a flock of rotten notes. Some afternoons, I wander through your photographs. Letters. Wonder if the river won your war.

"Finally I Allow Him The Pen,” Jeanann Verlee (via commovente)

#tag later

befitzgeraldwriting

I swear to every heaven ever imagined, if I hear one more dead-eyed hipster tell me that art is dead, I will personally summon Shakespeare from the grave so he can tell them every reason why he wishes he were born in a time where he could have a damn Gmail account. The day after I taught my mother how to send pictures over Iphone she texted me a blurry image of our cocker spaniel ten times in a row. Don’t you dare try to tell me that that is not beautiful. But whatever, go ahead and choose to stay in your backwards-hoping-all-inclusive club while the rest of us fall in love over Skype. Send angry letters to state representatives, as we record the years first sunrise so we can remember what beginning feels like when we are inches away from the trigger. Lock yourself away in your Antoinette castle while we eat cake and tweet to the whole universe that we did. Hashtag you’re a pretentious ass hole. Van Gogh would have taken 20 selflies a day. Sylvia Plath would have texted her lovers nothing but heart eyed emojis when she ran out of words. Andy Warhol would have had the worlds weirdest Vine account, and we all would have checked it every morning while we Snap Chat our coffee orders to the people we wish were pressed against our lips instead of lattes. This life is spilling over with 85 year olds rewatching JFK’s assassination and 7 year olds teaching themselves guitar over Youtube videos. Never again do I have to be afraid of forgetting what my fathers voice sounds like. No longer must we sneak into our families phonebook to look up an eating disorder hotline for our best friend. No more must I wonder what people in Australia sound like or how grasshoppers procreate. I will gleefully continue to take pictures of tulips in public parks on my cellphone and you will continue to scoff and that is okay. But I hope, I pray, that one day you will realize how blessed you are to be alive in a moment where you can google search how to say I love you in 164 different languages.

B.E. Fitzgerald, “Art is a Facebook Status About Your Winter Break”

#tag later

ahuntersheart

I want to eat your sparrow, come here. I want to lick your sparrow claws come here. I want to cut your sorrows out you’re hollowed out. Come here. I want to suck your fingers off. Come here. I want to give you your history back. Your fingers back. I want to tell you yes. Come back. I want to show you my pressure, my heavy, my opened and clothes, my under and o’s. Come here. I want to finger your bones back. I want to sew your bones back I want to re-blood your history. I want to undo you like a mystery novel. Is this the kitchen? The table-saw? Is this your memory? Your tree-dream? You’re declawed. I want to give you your teeth back. Your teeth marks. I want to spit back your teeth-pull. I want to unhinge your heart-jaws. Come here. I want to sit you down on the bed and give you back my years. Here. I breathed your name into the leaves. Here. I breathed you back into the trees. Here. This is your tree-dream this is your tree-house, this is a bedroom, this is a silver broom this is a shallow dream. This is my tree-dirt, my bee shirt. This is my honey-stalk and these are your climbing shoes. Harmonica me to sleep again. Put your sparrow on my back skin.

Kallie Falandays, “I Want To Tell You Yes”

#tag later

librarianpirate

This is just to say

I have eaten

the spiders that were in my cave

and which you were probably counting for statistical purposes

Forgive me I am an outlier adn should not have been counted

#spiders georg

In the Corner of a Room Where You would Never Look, Mark Bibbins

Warhol was right: he said athletes are fat in the right places and they're young in the right places. Apparently the next Godzilla movie has Godzilla just stomping around eating everyone's money and it's the scariest thing ever- we can rub bug powder on the national anthem and run that over the closing credits as long as the singer manages to sing I'm in love with everyone but you, almost convincingly. A production team undoing one another's pants is How We Get Naked Now but tomorrow morning all the cut-off parts of us are coming back so get ready. Europe: you swear it exists because you once had sex in it, and ideas. Prepositions: that's where we all get sucked under. Prepositions: the San Andreas fault of meaning. Prepositions: what came dislodged when our parents hired operatives to kidnap us from cults and deprogram us in the backs of vans. Warhol was talking about the ass, right, which we have come to understand is the vessel of histories. That effect. We put everything through a translation engine because we wanted to see the world.

#poetry #mark bibbins #politics #history #warhol

Late Fragment, Raymond Carver

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

#poetry #raymond carver #love #desire

Man In Space, Billy Collins

All you have to do is listen to the way a man sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people and notice how intent he is on making his point even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver, and you will know why the women in science fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine when the men from earth arrive in their rocket, why they are always standing in a semicircle with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by metal disks.

#poetry #billy collins #gender #science fiction #space

girlwomb-deactivated20180812

If girls are apples, this thing’s like a core— the glossy skin peeled off, the sweet juice drained, the body (pesky excess) pared away. And who’s to say you should want something more? If girls are buildings, all you need’s the door and one small room. The rest is too ornate, clever façade and showy balustrade, inimical to shelter, structure, warmth. If only real girls came apart like this— if you could take a mouth between your hands, and save a second, separate mouth to kiss when you were done. But no, they don’t, you can’t— can’t see, through their dark bodies, what’s inside; can’t take their heavy flesh and make it light.

Fleshlight

by Ali Shapiro

(via girlwomb)

#poetry #ali shapiro #gender #sexuality

talisman

Dew-drinker, opium-eater, I have seen your mouth transfigured By the fragments of ancient fevers. It was a wild, strange sound. Honey-seeker, sun-worshipper, I have heard the wind in white cedars And black poplars. It was the colour of wet narcissus. River-walker, crocus-gatherer, I have tasted the petals of acanthus And Thessalian iris. They were but circles of salt.

Bethany van Rijswijk, from ‘Opium-eater’ (via talisman)

#poetry #bethany van rijswijk #drugs #mythology

theapplepielifestyle

Imagine this: Wendy Darling becomes a pilot as soon as she comes of age, because she was always going to find a way to fly, and night after night sitting by the windowsill never got her anywhere other than the ground. When told of her curse, Sleeping Beauty goes in search of a spindle. Imagine this: Instead of mounting the land with her feet full of needles, Ariel watches as her lover slides into the ocean with his legs blurring into scales. One night, Belle finds herself growing a set of fangs and a coat of shaggy fur to match her Beast’s, and finds that she prefers jagged claws to blunt fingernails. Imagine this: Susan Pevensie is not shunted from her kingdom because she learned to use the only weapons she had at hand, forfeiting her bow and arrow for red-lined lips and slick nylons. After her feathers bloom like they do every night, Odette goes to find the sorcerer and plunges her beak into each of his eyes. Imagine this: True love’s kiss is sitting quietly in the middle of their priorities. If they find themselves locked in a castle, they break down the walls. Give me princesses in tattered chainmail or ripped dresses or both or neither. Give me princesses who ride around, slaying dragons or mounting them and claiming the sky. Imagine this: When they are placed up in a tower and told to wait for their hero, our princesses take their fate by the guts slide their thighs around the neck of their thrashing dragon and take to the stars.

'Reinventing Rescuing, ii,' theappleppielifestyle.

“Bored of the same old story, they invent something else for a princess to do than be rescued.” (via theappleppielifestyle)

#poetry #gender #fairy tale #princesses #sexism