I’m Dead Awake, Thank God

You’d Break Your Heart To Make It Bigger, So Why Not Crack Your Skull When The Mind Swells

[weltenwellen]

Julia Liu, from "Exit Wound"

[weltenwellen]

Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies

[weltenwellen]

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

[weltenwellen]

Leila Chatti, from "I Went Out to Hear"

[petaltexturedskies]

The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

Tennessee Williams

[weltenwellen]

Ocean Vuong, from “Woodworking at the End of the World”, Time Is a Mother

[ryebreadgf]

so it’s a wednesday night in july and you’re at home and you’ve showered and you’ve masturbated and you’ve gnawed at the inside of your mouth and you’ve eaten and washed the dishes and fixed a corner of the fitted sheet on your bed and texted your grandmother and thought positive thoughts and still the feeling comes. what then

[weltenwellen]

“I’m 24 years old and play this game with myself: buy myself something delicious for the weekend, blueberry muffins or flaky croissants, and forget it by Friday. Saturday morning comes and I am lucky to know me. I wasn’t born knowing how to love me, but I’m learning now; catching up for lost time between us. I keep the windows open. I play oldies throughout every corner of my apartment. I tell the dog how good it feels, at least for today, at least for right now, to be alive.”

— Schuyler Peck, Can’t Get Enough Of My Love 

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, from “These Days People Are Really Selling Me On California”, Instructions for Traveling West

[weltenwellen]

Tracy K. Smith, from “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?”, Life on Mars

[mortalityplays]

"I'm in my late 20s and I'm scared I've already peaked" just don't peak then, idiot. what do you mean like you're going to just stop trying to think harder and build taller and learn more and get luckier and read deeper and dress better and fuck weirder and run faster and draw crazier and smoke danker and dance bigger and steal better and stun everyone with your cunty charm and zeal because, what, you think those are the rules? get real. get up. you have another 50 years and you're not going to use them??? give them to me.

[tendermimi]

Mary Oliver, ‘north country’

[bananayoshimoto]

lindsey drager, the archive of alternative endings

[stlowens]

Mary Oliver, from “Moments.” [ID in alt text]

[lifeinpoetry]

I want to answer my mother: No, I’m afraid of you because of you.

— Chen Chen, from "a small book of questions: chapter i," Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

[seemoreandmore]

“When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways to drink directly from the stream of cool water, I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone, who used to do the same thing at that age; And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied, wipes the water dripping from his cheek with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him to use a glass, the way our father told my brother, because I like remembering my brother when he was young, decades before anything went wrong, and I like the way my son becomes a little more my brother for a moment through this small habit born of a simple need, which, natural and unprompted, ties them together across the bounds of death, and across time … as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds and entered this one through the kitchen faucet, my son and brother drinking the same water.”

— A Drink of Water BY JEFFREY HARRISON

[lifeinpoetry]

How can I explain the things and things and things I did wrong? I was never any good at telling the difference between what wanted me and what wanted me gone.

— Franny Choi, from "September 2001," The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

[sleepytimegal777]

1. A Primer for the Small Weird Loves - Richard Siken / 2. The Crane Wife - CJ Hauser / 3. Automat - Edward Hopper / 4. Red Doc> - Anne Carson / 5. Melancholy - Edvard Munch / 6. The Village (2004) / 7. So We Must Meet Apart - Gabrielle Bates and Jennifer S. Cheng

[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

[lifeinpoetry]

I know, from here on out, this beast I lured & wrangled to shore, the fight is mine alone.

— Alexandra Regalado, from "A Family History of Alcoholism," Relinquenda