From Autumn, to Ashes.

The light was so bright that we all looked away.

[aseaofquotes]

– Ernest Dowson

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I could still be like a river of light in your arms.

Clara Janés, tr. by Louis Burne, from “I Don’t Know,” written c. 1973 (via violentwavesofemotion)

[lifeinpoetry]

i make up rules for myself & then i break them. i promise i will drink less

& walk more & call my mom. i promise i’ll stop living so much inside my head.

— helga floros, from “Insomnia,” published in Occulum

[lifeinpoetry]

She is not afraid of gods. She leaves her skin, still coiled, a great throat collapsed. Gods have entered and left.

— Amber Flora Thomas, from “Shed,” Red Channel in the Rupture

[litverve]

Carrying a day is like carrying a mountain, those endless small words men use to guard their helplessness. Put your day down. Come to the bank in the snow wearing grace and pain, the silence at the end of sentences. Breathe the snow and the sad odor of human dust. All the roads are inside you, even the desire not to desire brooding over your own horizon. The innocents await you. There is no one to wish farewell except yourself in the orphaned dark.

Terrance Keenan, “Lullaby of Crossing the River” (via litverve)

[lifeinpoetry]

I’m not afraid of you.

I’m just afraid you’ll make me

see me, and one of us will have to walk away.

— Jason Bayani, from “Pulling Threads,” Amulet

[slavonicdoll-deactivated2020042]

“How desperate I became. To erase. To unmake my mouth, my pulse. / To unlive.”

— Jeanann Verlee, from “Fleeing the Murder (The Child),” Said the Manic to the Muse

[quotemadness]

Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.

Kait Rokowski (via quotemadness)

[lifeinpoetry]

Reminder: I am afraid. Reminder: It is inside me.

Andrea Juele, from “Note to Self,” published in Aster(ix)

[lifeinpoetry]

To feed on ruin, milk-dark nights, the bones // of beginnings.

Cynthia Dewi Oka, from Salvage (via lifeinpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

I will horror, I will hell them, I am prophet.

Lisa Marie Basile, from “Prophecies,” published in Crab Fat Magazine (via lifeinpoetry)

[theclassicsreader]

when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

Mary Oliver, from “When Death Comes” (via theclassicsreader)

[lifeinpoetry]

All living is listening for a throat to open— The length of its silence shaping lives.

Claudia Rankine, from “Long Form Birth Certificate,” Citizen: An American Lyric (via lifeinpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

sometimes a mind is ready to leave // the world before its body sometimes paradise happens / too early and leaves us shuddering in its wake

Kaveh Akbar, from “Unburnable the Cold Is Flooding Our Lives,” Calling a Wolf a Wolf (via lifeinpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

We’re only

as useless as you make us.         Praise sound.       The smallest    lyric.        The way we use the dead      to live.

—  Chelsea Dingman, from “Morning Benedictions with Dead Baby Syndrome,” published in The Adroit Journal

[panatmansam]

Death twitches my ear. ‘Live,’ he says, ‘I am coming.’

Virgil (via panatmansam)

[lifeinpoetry]

We are learning so much so quickly. The sun

is dying. The atom is reducible. The god-harnesses we thought we came with were just our tiny lungs.

— Kaveh Akbar, from “Everything That Moves Is Alive and a Threat—a Reminder,” Calling a Wolf a Wolf