a wandering sheep

 Anna Hundert, Brown University. https://medium.com/@anna.hundert Not actively posting my own work here anymore, but I still make an effort to support other poets & writers on tumblr by reblogging the work that I love most. (Do message me if you would prefer to be additionally credited with your full name.)  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

[boykeats]

a rough draft 

[averno-averno]

Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth. A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts! There are fumes I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules? If I could bleed, or sleep! If my mouth could marry a hurt like that! Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling. But colorless. Colorless.

Sylvia Plath,  Poppies In July (via remnantsofapoet)

[warmthcalled]

i am starting to notice roughness around the edges / it is coming for me / it is coming / imminent / grand // if i leave a crumble / ants will come / and scare you away // i always liked graveyards / and how their trees sing / silently / about nothing / and about no-one // losing myself in you is the equivalent of death /

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second.

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West (via swingmeyourbones)

[viperslang]

God occupies me as a shapeless hunger.

Scherezade Siobhan, The Mirror I won’t (Published in Rattle)

[fantodsdhrit]

night of jasmines, poignant—

see how tears trickle like pearls

in everglades; come sadness—

no more.

[songofanothersummer]

If only I could find the poetry embedded in the DNA of everything, pluck the stardust out of our gene pool and examine galaxies in miniature that have taken up residence within our hearts and in our heads,  made in the image of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Forgotten Ghosts of all the stars and systems we left behind when we found life, the ones we drew up millennia ago and left to strew the skies in ancient maps reminding us that we were all borne from the same gaping maw of the unseen infinite, menacing and miraculous. I will fine-tune my eyes in the meantime until every unknown color comes into focus, colors either lost or forgotten to time and a slew of unnecessary mutations, as the kaleidoscope confusion clouding my perception of the world ultimately collides and collapses in and upon itself into a single image and the universe becomes whole again and is no longer a splintered memory whose fragments have allowed us only to keep forgetting, to keep yearning, to keep wondering what it is that we are missing, as if we knew once and have become so far removed in our knowing that we know-not, no, not any longer, and the cycle completes itself and repeats again ad infinitum. And upon the completion of the universe, maybe it will swallow me up alongside the multitudes of galaxies I live knowingly beside but may regrettably never come to see.

Brittany Rubio, The View from the Edge of the Void. (via songofanothersummer)

[awanderingsheep]

How to Lose Weight in 10 Easy Steps

Some excerpts from my latest Medium post, “How to Lose Weight in 10 Easy Steps,” a lyric essay about taking up space (these are my favorite bits; the beginning, middle, and end): 

00. This is apparently how counting starts. I don’t make the rules. Maybe the “double zero” jeans size was invented because negative numbers on tags might tell women that we can or should take up negative space in the universe, which is to say that instead of displacing air with our bodies, we can or should create more empty space with our presence.

10. There is something magical about women and it is not about the creation of life, it is simply this: once we grow to a certain size, once we occupy a certain amount of space, it is as if we aren’t there at all. There are numbers in this list above 10, but you cannot see them because they are invisible.

00. I have come to appreciate roundness in many forms, and I have come to love the round parts of my body more than I once did, the way my round waist curves forward and gives way to my round belly, my round breasts, and those mounds of flesh that hang down from the tops of my arms when I spread them out to fly. Everything still jiggles when I shake, even after all that I have lost.

Read the whole thing here at Crossing Genres. 

[exahele]

One of the poems from my book! Buy a copy at lulu.com/spotlight/flashingexitsigns

[lebuc]

* i’m sitting for an interview to be the only streetlight on the corner of 15th and Lake

overlooking a vacant lot where lovers are known to meet; a pulblic space partially obscured

by bushes left sprouting on the side of an empty shell of a building long-scheduled for demolition but this cash-strapped municipality - ehhh - casting a formidable shadow or so they believe

figure i’d be great for the job - i emit intermittently low illumination chronicling the parade of the hopefuls for my novellas on commission

ever ready to occupy a semi-barren realm nightly,  amidst brighter lights down the block

i’m patiently able to pass the time in meditation, watching my breath - in & out  - & in again - & out…

i think i’m great for the job.

darkness never bothered me much nor does it ever fuss over my presence, alighting every dusk-brushed evening;

wish me luck. * 8/16 - lebuc - the interview

[awanderingsheep]

Stop Telling Our Future President to Smile

Hey tumblr friends -- I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while and now it feels a little dated, but I want to let you know that a post on my Medium blog got featured on the Editors’ Picks page last week! Yay! Here’s an excerpt:

...So I encourage you to think just a little bit harder before you criticize Hillary for being cold. Or that she “should smile more.” What are the gendered implications of your criticism?

(I’m reminded of the strange men who tell me “smile, baby” as I walk past them on my way to work.)

These days, the #NeverHillary and #ImWithHer folks are busy writing thinkpieces that often call the other side “privileged” for their point of view. (Here’s an example from each side, if you’re curious.) Among my generation, privilege seems to be the theme of this election season, whether you’re talking about an actual platform or criticizing its supporters.

So let’s talk about Hillary’s privilege.

She’s got buckets of white privilege and class privilege going for her, but here’s one she doesn’t have: the privilege of smiling a lot. That is a luxury you can only afford if people are willing to take you seriously by default.

You can read the whole thing here. 

(Also, I’d encourage you to check out Medium as a platform for your work, especially when it feels too long-form for tumblr -- I’m still new to it, but really liking it so far. It has this nice, aesthetically-pleasing green theme.)

[maldarchive]

In the dark, a frantic effort to hold. Or be held– the luxury 

of heat, of promise. Of course I cannot afford it. Too much

to lose if I have. An arm or another or both! Impossible,

the return. But I allow this. Suit the feral heart of need,

let it at least try. In vain– still, its howling calms

and when the dream comes, I am not startled by it.

[literarystarbucks]

Jabbercoffee

‘Twas frothy, and the slithy beans     Did grind and trimble in the shabe; All mimsy were the ice-o-treens,     And the tea bags outgrabe. 

“Beware the Barista, my son     The beard that waves, avuncular! Beware the Managers, and shun     The frumious customer!”

He took his vorpal wallet in hand;     Long time the manxome cup he sought— So rested he on a stool by the window,     And sat awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he sat,     The Barista, with apron of flame, Came sniffling through the trambly pat,     And burbled as it came!

Mocha! Latte! And swiftly there     The vorpal wallet produced a bill! He ordered three, with such great speed,     It left the server dead.

“And hast thou slain the Barista?     Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”     He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas frothy, and the slithy beans     Did grind and trimble in the shabe; All mimsy were the ice-o-treens,     And the tea bags outgrabe.

[days-of-reading]

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

[whitterings]

I patch the holes in my chest with lucid company, filtering in a filmed transparency I don’t distinguish in need. I cut the corner of my lips to forge a smile but it’s lost behind my eyes to a truth I can’t fight and I’m struggling for breath in the night air because my walk home thickens to a clarity not even intoxication can forget. Tears write regret until sleep finds sanity beneath the dome of darkness, counting crosses on my pillow it’s another night before progress.

but you’re sleeping fine. (via whitterings)

[alwaysinyouratmosphere]

Now girls are often raised to see love only as giving. Women are praised for their love when that love is an act of giving. But to love is to give AND to take. Please love by giving, and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you’ll know. You’ll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don’t silence that voice. Dare to take.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, commencement speech at Wellesley College (via alwaysinyouratmosphere)

someone please shake me and say these words to me every few days thank you

[awanderingsheep]

“love shook my mind...” (found: Sappho and Plath)

love shook my mind like a wind falling on oak-trees on a moutain where the oak-trees are not pliant enough to bend with the wind, they are not young saplings anymore. when the trees saw their reflection they knew they were beautiful, they had no reverence for the atrocity of sunsets, I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

limbs, images, shrieks shook my mind like a wind falling on oak-trees on a mountain where snow rests upon my branches like heavy balloons. the snow has no voice and I have no voice, too shaken by limbs and images and shrieks and wind and pressed into this passive voice, I am putty. clear vowels rise like my soul’s reins in your hand, not knowing that you hold my soul’s reins in your hand. your hand is tin-white, like arsenic.

I am the irreplaceable golds and empty glitters - love shook my mind with perfect fidelity and mortal breath. like a wind falling on oak trees on a mountain.

–

(I mostly found this poem in translated fragments of Sappho and also some Sylvia Plath – about half the words are mine)