Exhaling Poetry

And this is the way we learn of each other ~the way we learn to pour gold into the broken spaces ~ how we become whole again.

[exhalingpoetry]

art credit: Marilyn Monroe Cloud Portrait by John Lijo Bluefish driving on 676 and the clouds are a rustle of satin or    they’re cream that’s been over-whipped There are no peaks you’re gonna have to start over No    sorry the clouds they’re more the folds of her skirt that white dress she wore Halloween Marilyn Monroe that glow-white hair I helped bleach to halo in Eastern Pennsylvania autumn breaking from frats and crowds original wood-flooring carpeted with booze that rickety porch was backway ballroom in war-boom new york where she and I could both raise our hems and hem our hair and pull on pearls and pass a cigarette in brick alley. tilt our heads together so her bottle blonde highlighted my fawn brown. lips brushed, her bottle red printed my softshell pink. But    maybe too the clouds could be the way she would wrinkle cigarettes That’s right they’re definitely the wrinkle of the cigarette she pinched them funny and I watched the way she watched the cigarette’s flare passed it to me with patchy kisses left on the filter from Marilyn-red lips and then looked up Perfectly-peaked clouds because in that Pennsylvania valley at the end of October it snowed that snow was curtains in glossed-up hotel top floor where she and I could both raise our glasses, wrists blending and effervescence invading lungs, bubbling up giggles in the negligée corners. bend heads to shoulders, angle elbows to frazzle updos, undo makeup. Fingertips brush, stockings falling on bare legs. Maybe the clouds are the quiet of going out every week not healing anxiety coursing through bones not making her love me     but at least It was quiet No    sorry the clouds are her smile like home, hanging over my head just like the clouds over the 676 offramp to this city people claim is broken has built its picked bones to home for me ~Allison Casey  

[exhalingpoetry]

photo credit: Russ Barnes Photography

Instructions on Not Giving Up

Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

[rexisky]

Fire (24 x 36", Oil on cradled Wood) by Erica Wexler

[exhalingpoetry]

Part Five: The Single Hound

THE LARGEST fire ever known Occurs each afternoon, Discovered is without surprise, Proceeds without concern: Consumes, and no report to men, An Occidental town, Rebuilt another morning To be again burned down.

by Emily Dickinson

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And the Ghosts they own everything. ~Graham Foust {photo credit: "Aushwitz," Cole Thompson}

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{photo credit:  GORDON PARKS, Harlem Rally, New York, 1963, silver print, 8 7}

Excerpt from principles (after JFK):

“i want a country that keeps its word.

i want to not be scared to drink the water.

i want a country that don’t bomb other countries.

i want a country that don’t treat a it’s people

like a virus. i want a country not trying

to cure itself of me. i want a country

that treats my mama right. i want a land

where my sister can be free. i want a country

that don’t look at me and my man & think

about where and how we should burn. I want a nation under a kinder god. I want justice the verb not justice the dream.”

Read the rest here: http://www.danezsmithpoet.com/a-poem-principles/

[exhalingpoetry]

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up, as if orchards were dying high in space. Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling. And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Rainer Maria Rilke (as translated by Robert Bly)

[endlessforms-deactivated2018021]

Histomap of Evolution. (by Endless Forms Most Beautiful)

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Poetry of Maps

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Giving Up Everything 
my hungry ghost of hopefulness.
 Giving up everything, 
not haunted by wanting this.
 Giving up everything, 
the fortune I was saving. 
 Giving up everything,
 I mercy-killed my craving.
 Giving up everything, 
I’ve opened up my eyes for this.
 Giving up everything, 
see the whole magnificent emptiness.
 Gave what I want for how it is, 
for the stone inside and the bitterness, 
for the sweetness at the core of it.
 Giving up everything,
 the master plan, the scheming.
 Giving up everything, 
my cursed search for meaning.
 Giving up everything, 
the compass and the map I was reading.

 The hinterlands I’m leaving,
 I’m finally leaving behind.
 Giving up everything, 
the big to-do, the hullabaloo, the tug-of-war for some twisted truth. 
For the everlasting ache of it,
 no longer slave, not chained to it, 
no gate, no guard, no keeper, 
no guru, master, teacher.

 See the slow-receding faces 
dissolve to black, no traces.

[exhalingpoetry]

#NowPlaying Fear by Blue October "Fear in itself Will reel you in and spit you out Over and over again Believe in yourself And you will walk Fear in itself Will use you up and break you down like you were never enough I used to fall, now I get back up."

[exhalingpoetry]

Description for Police

what did the suspect look like?

the sound a shadow makes breathing tallow & spume back into its heaving barnacled body, deranged gospel of milk-teeth, a votive candle extinguished in a flat glass of cola.

what was the suspect’s gender?

something like a brick buried in the walls of a library. or maybe just the word – brick – buried in books: demolished tower scattered amidst babel, a building hidden in a building.

what was the suspect’s race?

a beam of light throws up its hands & is skinned alive.

did the suspect have a weapon?

thank god we no longer carve the shape of our dead general’s faces into mountains. thank god we’ve bred wolves into dogs into dolls

thank god we’ve deformed wheat germ & corn into new edible organism. don’t forget all the good that can be done with a scythe.

what was the suspect wearing?

cotton, trapped in a bottle of rubbing alcohol, or caught on a length of chain fence, or woven into the fabric of a bulk-pack of white t’s from the grocery. gets dirty easy but for that one night, you’ve never seen anything cleaner in your life

what did the suspect say?

if you look at any animate object under a microscope, you’ll see it’s made of smaller screaming parts.

if you smash the microscope, take the blood it makes of your hands & bathe your eyes. tell me what you see, how simple & red the light.

~Sam Sax

{graphite illustration by Hernan Marin}

[exhalingpoetry]

Yearning in Cháng'ān

By Li Bai Translated by A.Z. Foreman 　　Endlessly yearning for you 　　In the city called Endless Peace, Where autumn crickets cry from the well's rail that shines of gold,　 Where flecks of frost blow chill and leave the bedmat colored cold,　 　　With no light from the lonely little lantern, 　　The thread of longing set to snap out loud, 　　Gaze at the moon, and heave a useless sigh: 　　My love, a flower beyond that wall of cloud! 　　And high above　the heavens' blue dark reign 　　And down below　the waters' pale waves stream Endless the sky, and far the journey - the fleet soul grieves in flight,　 And cannot touch beyond those mountains even in a dream.　 　　So endlessly the yearning 　　Beats a man's heart down.

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Photo credit: Michael Bilotta, "Not With a Bang, but a Whimper"

[elvedon]

This speaks of pomegranates and peeling survival. A childhood of underlying currents in your hands. What lays soft within is burning by the seams.

Ana C

.,

BURNING BY THE SEAMS (via elvedon)

{art credit: “ Burning Tree in the Ocean by iSkyloft}

[harrukimurrakami]

I can’t think of anything but nights with you.

Zelda Fitzgerald to Scott Fitzgerald, 1919. (via theburnthatkeepseverything)

[saphhoria]

A SPLIT LIP AND BUSTED KNUCKLES There was no fist fight. No angry punches. Just his voice saying ‘I love you, but not like that.’ Just teeth, cutting into lips. Just the mirror, and then my knuckles loud on the mirror. Not like that by Darshana Suresh

[darshanasuresh]

sing, o muse, of the pain of watching a loved thing fall. of daedalus, hands reaching down, down, down, hands extended as far as they could extend, hands turning to claws in frustration –  of daedalus, able to create  anything, but unable to bring  his own son back to life.  of phaethon, back arched in a  final bow, ground rushing  to meet him, hands hands hands  burning / burning. of helios, laughing. of apollo, chasing and chasing until a girl is no longer a girl but a laurel tree. of the sun and its heat, its scathing, of fires ravaging through troy, through houses, through people (screams in the air, along with the stench of flesh). let me tell you of the sun and how it burnt me down from the inside out, how it makes my knees knock like they’re filled  with a dozen wasps. here is another myth: girl wakes and sees the sun /  girl goes back to sleep.

Heliocentric

by Darshana Suresh (first published in Sugarplum)

{painting credit: Daedalus and Icarus, Jacob Peter Gowy (1635)}

http://platypuspress.co.uk/howlingatthemoon

[elvedon]

[exhalingpoetry]