i won’t run from it

a.a.

[eesirachs]

adam wakes up, probes his side. rib gone, wound sticky. god's fingers have touched a place that will never be touched again. how does adam not curl up, swell and fall, beg god to touch him again. to touch him everywhere else. not just ribs but cheek, inner thigh, lap. the worst part of the side-wound is not that god penetrated you but that he won't do it again

[somethinginthestatic]

“Here’s my question. If the ghost wants nothing more than to be witnessed, why would it appear behind you, not in front of you? The only answer I can think of is this: it appears behind you because it already knows, to an absolute certainty, that you will have no choice but to look back.”

— I Am In Eskew, Jon Ware

[apoemaday]

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

by Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

[firstfullmoon]

Two cigarette butts— left by you

the first time you visited my apartment. The next day

I found them, they were still there—

picking one up, I put my lips where yours had been…

*

Our not-love is like a man running down a mountain, who, if he dares to try to stop,

falls over— my hand wanted to touch your hands

because we had hands.

— Frank Bidart, from “In the Western Night”

[merulae]

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

– Anne Carson, “Could 1” in Candor from BOMB Magazine

[sweetestsecrets]

“one day I will stop all this yearning but for now it is everywhere. I don’t know what to do with old love so I stuff it in my mouth like cotton balls and pretend I’m not choking. if you catch me on the wrong day, I’ll cry all over your favorite shirt and that’s how you’ll remember me years later. I’ve always been a phone call jarring you from sleep and it’s not worth answering. yesterday, there was a needle in my neck and I didn’t even flinch. that should tell you all there is to know about me.”

— Fortesa Latifi - everything there is (via madgirlf)

[foremma]

I see nighthawks and malted milk; Here is your name in my throat

The sun hits my arm  like a five star, red hot mark from the hand of my best friend. I am a box of Drumstick ice creams sitting in a shopping cart on a Sunday afternoon in August.

I am that empty kitchen with light pouring through. You loved me once, didn’t you?

These things pass. A swelling lump in my throat, I swallow I swallow I swallow

[foremma]

and I know all poetry is forgiveness / for what this world can not always hold.

[264571956-deactivated20210621]

“There are some of us who didn’t ask to be born in our particular here, and there are some of us who didn’t ask to come to this particular here, but to be in wherever your here is means that you might be compelled to both fight for it and forgive it.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, “How Aging — and Age — Can Change a Song’s Meaning” in The New York Times  (via weltenwellen)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“Memory is required for poetry, but memory of a very special kind. Not the dimestore memories of reproducing what once happened to you, but rather syntactical memories, gathering the emotional weight of the poem as it accrues from line to line. Poetry is associative, not dissociative: it proceeds neither by fact, nor chronological sequence, nor strictly reasoned argument. It follows the inexorable logic of the way we think and feel and what we notice (which is where the poem’s camera focuses). The poet remembers how something seen or heard in line one stays with the reader (and therefore the writer); what the poet composes later in the poem responds to and advances those earlier lines or stanzas. That’s where improvisation and form intersect. When a trumpeter in a jazz group is about to solo, he or she must listen to what the tenor saxophone’s just said about the melody, then honor and leap off from that earlier solo. Even interruptions in the ow of musical or poetic experience—fractures, leaps in melody, time, and space—function to reassess or illuminate what the work of art has already suggested. A poet always pursues what matters while respecting the lateral and (only apparent) digressive movement of experience. In this manner a poem retains its urgency and its embodied intelligence, the discoveries couched in its structure, while suggesting the importance of every moment, not only in and of itself, but also as that moment is situated between a past with consequences and a future that must be confronted “

Ira Sadoff, from “Poetic Memory, Poetic Design,” New England Review (vol. 31, no 3, Summer 2010)

[buttonpoetry]

It must be nice to wrap your arms around an unscathed body. It must be nice to wrap your tongue around every word in a song without also asking to bleed out on a sidewalk.

Hanif Abdurraqib - “A Genealogy” (via buttonpoetry)

[mulika]

[inkskinned]

i am reminded by a professor - once a person leaves, you will never love like that again.

how wonderful. i will love in a new way each time, then, for new reasons. i will find out that my heart never had a limit on joy. i will know new things.

he says - we can never find our way back to loving the same way twice.

i am not the same person from before, though, am i? why would i want to take a tour of my life through the same eyes? why would i want to hold the same figure-eight? why would i come back to what has already been shoved through my throat? why wouldn't i want to walk in a new garden, with new stones?

it is also never the same sunset twice. the same thunderstorm. the same birdsong. life, in little chaos, holds no ghosts. i will love again, and thank god, it will be different. i move on, and the world says - you will meet someone else, who knows a different way to listen. and when i put my ears against the music again, it will feel like i am understanding a new set of secrets.

how wonderful. my love does not run out. it is remade and recolored and unstained in doubt. gold hair, coffee, the shape of her mouth.

[sweetestsecrets]

“On the anvil of love my flesh has been hammered out. Indifferent, in the indifferent air, I circulate and suck the star-space in.”

— Stanley Kunitz, from “How Long Is The Night?,” The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000)

[foremma]

there is too much grief and loss in the world, and this year has been so, so heavy. all too heavy. the year is ending and i am tired and too battered for a new one. i long for something other than this. i long for light. that’s all.

[foremma]

what do i want to make of this life now that i hold it in my hands?

[grievingchild]

“I think that love poems are really powerful when they’re written by people who aren’t in love. Almost as if to say:Look how much I can hurt without anyone’s help. Look how full of no one I can be without collapsing. This love poem is proof that I know how to carry a torch. This love poem is proof that I’ve had the dream with a king-sized bed in it. This love poem is screaming out an open window, is screaming into my pillow. I know what I’m capable of.”

— Caitlyn Siehl, Proof (via alonesomes)