🌞 grace 🌞

just me trying to be deep | 18 |

[gracedoespoetry]

Today there has been so

Much talk of war: things

Exploding and children

Dying and mothers hurting.

I am sick by your lack

Of surprise at it all. It is the

Way the world has always

Been but I cannot get used

To it. How can you nod

Along? Why are you not falling

To your knees and wailing?

Beating your chest with

Grief? I think I could lament

This world for all my time in it.

[gracedoespoetry]

supermassive black hole

Mum

Are you sure when I was born

I was a person

And not just a vortex

Always hungry

Always swallowing

No matter how much goes in me

I always end up empty.

You sigh

As you fold my linen

I was such an easy baby

But boy, what an appetite

You thought I’d grow out of it

Is that why you keep feeding me?

Everything here

Leans towards my center

I think even the world

Will rest inside me soon

Why is my mouth big enough

To fit the universe

But not you, mum?

Can I force you down?

Sometimes it whispers

Instead of shouts

Like something small

Refusing to be forgotten

Like every stubborn thing

That survives because it insists to.

I am sure it is more

Than a hunger.

[gracedoespoetry]

The stars are so small

And I am enormous.

Do you ever look up at the night

And ponder the enormity of yourself?

I lift my hand out;

It covers thousands of them.

Sometimes I blink

And there's no more stars

And I laugh.

I say you've been dead for billions of years

But I am here living.

How do they fit in the sky?

All they do is burn.

Do they have their own Heaven

Somewhere beyond them?

I am not a religious person,

I am hardly a person at all.

Except when I look at the stars

And think that their life

Must go on forever,

Cannot have ended,

Because it is so perfect.

[gracedoespoetry]

The oven hasn't been working

for the past week

and the time

written there in

mechanical, green lettering,

wont stop blinking at me.

Something must be done

something must be done.

I haven't been sleeping.

I hate lying on my right side,

but when I roll onto my left,

the red standby light from the telly

permeates my eyelids

and the blue blinking

from the thermostat

makes purple.

My mother told me

its bad luck to keep dead flowers

but nobody ever says what to do

with the heart rotting inside you.

The smell is starting to alarm the neighbours.

The police will be at my door any day now

but there is nothing left here

for them to find.

[gracedoespoetry]

revised version of the poem i posted on saturday

[gracedoespoetry]

the poem i will be reading to my creative writing workshop group on monday.

[gracedoespoetry]

On Gravity and Anger and Other Heavy Things

she was so full of anger

and misanthropy

that she felt she’d erupt

and level mountains

with the force of her fury.

(this is all a figure of speech,

of course;

she knows that it’s much more likely

that she will collapse in on herself,

the gravity of her sins

pulling from every direction,

until she’s nothing more

than a slowly dying neutron star.)

[gracedoespoetry]

i am just a dog in a kennel, now.

just a declawed, matted girl

whose bite has never

done enough damage anyway.

[shisasan]

December 2, 1912 Letters to Felice by Franz Kafka First published : 1973

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— josé olivarez // natalie diaz

[gracedoespoetry]

today i read that pigs don't see the sky

unless they fall on their backs.

i wonder if they hate being righted again,

for what is grass

to someone who has once seen the clouds?

some days i think living

is just learning to bear the light.

other days,

i envy those pigs who have never fallen,

who never have to look up

at all.

[gracedoespoetry]

i keep trying to grow flowers out of ash and the gentleness feels like a rebellion. i was not made to be kind, but i am trying anyway. some things cannot be helped, like when i shout back at my mother. it’s weird to me, sometimes, how we don’t look alike until we do.

[gracedoespoetry]

there are teeth in my voice and i don’t remember swallowing them. i spit them out and wipe at the mess but i am useless to fix any of it.

[lena-oleanderson]

also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.