[301-302]

The Other Side of the Underneath (Jane Arden | 1983)

[sweatermuppet]

(The Mothman Gets High) by Robert Wood Lynn, published in Mothman Apologia

[Text ID: Yes. There is a point at which any person gets tired of knowledge. You could call this a threshold, or you could call this the point at which a person gets tired of knowledge. I'll tell you this: I've never felt further from another than when standing beside them trying to point out a star. /End ID]

[weltenwellen]

Maggie Smith, “Small Blue Town”, Goldenrod

[beguines]

Leila Chatti, "Postcard from Gone"

[damonalbarngirl]

oh.....

[lifeinpoetry]

Lord,

if I say, Bless the cold water you throw on my face, does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort if I ask you not to kill my friends—if I beg you to press your heel against my throat—please, not enough to ruin me, but just so—just so I can almost see your face—

— Franny Choi, from "Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness," The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

[mymotherlaughs]

tove ditlevsen

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

“heaven’s not a place more a wound i make & pass through”

— On PrEP or on Prayer [“spare us your burial rites”] by Sam Sax

[julykings]

i’m not sure i’m capable of being loved right now / i feel safe in my quiet way of living and telling my secrets to thread & paper / i don’t know what i’d say if you asked me to know myself / more

[existential-celestial]

Franz Wright, from “East Boston, 1996; Night Walk,” in God’s Silence

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things, The actual green of summer, and summer’s half-truth. We tend to repeat ourselves.”

— Charles Wright, from “Polaroids,” A Short History of the Shadow: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

[liliesofpur-i-ty]

Clarice Lispector, too, had died with flowers

A sudden lack of air. Long before the metamorphosis of my ill-being, I had already noticed in one of the paintings in my house a beginning.

Me, me, if memory does not fail me, I shall die.

I am a cherished object of God. And this is what gave birth to flowers in my bosom. He created me equal to what I am writing now: “I am a cherished object of God” and he liked having created me as I liked creating the sentence. And the more the human object has spirit the more God is satisfied.

White lilies pressed against the nudity of my bosom. I offer white lilies to what hurts me in you. For we are beings who lack. This because certain things–if they are not given–wilt. For example, the lilies’ petals would burn against the warmth of my body. I call the light breeze for my future death. I will have to die, otherwise my petals will burn. This is why I give myself up to death every day. I die and I am born again. 

Moreover, I have already died from the death of others. But now I am dying from drunkenness of life. And I bless the warmth of the living body that wilts white lilies.

“…written on a slip of paper, since she could no longer speak, on December 9, 1977; I believe she died on the 9th or the 10th”. from Clarice Lispector–Esboço para um possivel retrato, Olga Borelli. quoted by Hélène Cixous in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

[clatteriing]

Again, I lay at God’s feet like a heap of tropical wilt. Begged a beginning, or a spectacular end. I wanted to be a gnat-thin thing or at least not Muslim: God came as a forest, pregnant with steel, growing her droning fury—   between my eyebrows an apology itched, still and absolute. I shucked and spat into an ashtray my language. Was all I touched a deity? Khodaye ab, god of water. Then, my own hushed sex: Khodaye Kus. God quite the dealmaker, chopped all my copper hair and gave me knotted roots, a twig. Bugs suffused and were havocked in my mouth. It didn’t matter whether I inhabited a human or a tree: I remained a glob of impermanence. Plenty of me was heavy inside the earth. And parts of me were not at all: under such strain, a brain remembers its first music—   Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim, I sang, and its pulse enclaved me like my first big fiction, all those finches I had drowned in the river––   Bismillah, bismillah, bismillah, I thought, and God thrust down my throat her jittering hand, until my sins came forth as guppies in an avalanche of bile. I was unspectacular as fish scales dropped on a roadside. As morning trickled the canopy, my metallic nudity was washed with cold. Beads of aloe and mint furled from my skin. I stared down at this thing I was becoming and eventually, God begot me with her saltless strings. All this time it had been wrong, the way I was beseeching––   to want the universe to pity me.

The Ceremony by Aria Aber (via clatteriing)

[bibliomancyoracle]

Don’t rush—this road is a dead end! Why gallop toward infinity? 

*

from “Drink! Drink!” by Nadia Anjuman (translated by Diana Arterian and Marina Omar)

[lifeinpoetry]

I crawl slimy from a cave beneath yr heart I hiss, I spit oracles at yr front door in a language you have forgotten. I unroll the scroll of yr despair, I bind yr children with it. It is for this you love me. It is for this you seek me everywhere. Because I gave you apples out of season Because I gnaw at the boundaries of the light

— Diane di Prima, from “Loba as Eve,” Loba

[lifeinpoetry]

to live in proximity to death is to live in the space of premonition

Bahaar Ahsan, from “cut the apricot in half and remove the pit the pit can only get in your way,” We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, eds. Andrea Abi-Karam & Kay Gabriel (via lifeinpoetry)

[graveblockers]

Robert Montgomery is my new favorite poet.