This Isn't About You Anymore

[asecondletter]

My child asks what makes me cry.

I smile.

I say, the part in that movie we watch together.

I do not say

The endless weight and toil of each passing day.

I do not say

A person in a hazmat suit digging through rubble, trying on someone else's skin like a glove.

I do not say

My favorite aunt

Riddled with cancer.

I do not say

The thought of you, my love, my every sweetness, curled up on the crook of my arm while your father slept.

I do not say

The very thought of living and living and having to live

Only to end up crushed by an earthquake, torn apart in the sky, blown to bits in the living room,

Or six feet underground a week after your hundredth birthday.

For God's sake, find me a church

Or a witch

Or an oven.

My son,

My one true love and light,

Do not hear this now,

But one day know,

I am never not crying.

I cannot fucking stop.

[oldpaintings]

Despair, 1905 by Marcel Roux (French, 1878–1922)

[soltantoillusionii]

In questi giorni se apri la finestra

[asecondletter]

Seven days after you were born,

On the night I almost died,

Your father called his father

And begged him to come watch you

While he watched me and made sure I did not leave you both behind.

Your grandfather made a thirty-five minute drive

In maybe twenty?

I often think about his foot pressing down and down on the pedals of his car.

Burning rubber in the night to reach us.

[asecondletter]

In the suffocating heat of summer,

My son sleeps with nothing but goosebumps

And a days worth of salt on his skin

Between his sheets.

In the early morning he climbs into my bed

And presses the length of his small body against my back.

He asks me how animals came to be on the earth, if snakes were alive before wolves, and do dogs die, and can we get out of bed.

Sometimes he goes back to sleep, and I live in the inhale of his breath.

Sometimes I lay next to him as the room fills with light,

And I think of everything single thing

Except what other life I could be living.

[mournfulroses]

Ruth Krauss, from a poem titled "Song," featured in Love Is Like The Lion's Tooth: An Anthology of Love Poems

[mournfulroses]

Li Qingzhao, from a poem titled "Late Spring," featured in The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao

[achillesinhighheels]

[asecondletter]

Its Friday night

And after sitting down to dinner

With my parents

I tell my husband

That I am living in a timeline of the universe

That is just slightly off-center.

How else do you get a dog, but hold no affection for it.

How else does your son stay an only child.

How else do my parents, who perhaps once loved me, sit across a meal from me and feel like vast pits of bitterness and resentment.

In this universe I have two left feet, and my mother's temper. I'm always walking just slightly off center, holding my breath.

[lasfloresrotasblogdepoesia]

Alois Kalvoda, Lovers In The Grass (s/f)

[sustancy]

[mournfulroses]

Tove Ditlevsen, from a poem featured in There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die: Selected Poems

[neckkiss]

“Lost in translation”

[thoughtcascades]

i don’t want healing, i want someone to sit in the dark with me and not ask why

[neckkiss]

It is.

[quotesjunkie]

Quotes Junkie:

The Family Stone

[prairienina]

THE FAMILY STONE 2005 — dir. Thomas Bezucha

[neckkiss]

Moments..