becoming & unbecoming

[lifeinpoetry]

“What is a witch but a woman men cannot quiet?”

— Carla Sofia Ferreira, from “Fragments Shored Against Our Ruins,” published in Honey & Lime

[archiveofyearning]

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place // Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities // Warsan Shire, Conversations About Home // Fatimah Asghar, Partition // Aysha, Diaspora Defiance // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous // Kaveh Akbar, Do You Speak Persian? // Safia Elhillo, Date Night With Abdelhalim Hafez // Gustavo Perez Firmat, Bilingual Blues // Scherezade Siobhan, How to Welcome the Dead

[givenchygloss]

“In my memory, it doesn’t end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.”

— John Green / Paper Towns (via bnmxfld)

[thebookquotes]

I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.

— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

[weltenwellen]

“But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain,”

— Ada Limón, from “The Leash”, The Carrying

[heartcountry]

“I know this story / I know that I go towards what I don’t know / Perhaps I’m still alive somewhere.”

— Mahmoud Darwish, from ‘Mural’, Mural (trans. John Berger & Rema Hammami)

[drogonqueen]

Samson, Regina Spektor

Little Beast, Richard Siken

Vicious, V.E Schwab

If Not, Winter, Sappho (translated by Anne Carson)

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

[ID: excerpt from ‘hand stitched’ 

“body snapping back to the light where i see the reflection of me has become tangible, stitched loosely together with fever & faith.  i smile tightly & it smiles back. 

it kisses my mother goodnight & sleeps  on the wrong side of the bed.”]

[lifeinpoetry]

Sometimes, when I see you in a crowd, and I pretend not to, I remember the way you

looked the last night I saw you and you said in another life we would be happy. And I said in another life we would be

free from one another’s ghosts.

— Chloe N. Clark,. from “The Double Dark Theory of Our Universe,” published in Pidgeonholes

[medusagirlfriend-blog]

1 2 3

[wolfsmilk]

“I’m sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as I know I am completely loved.”

[yvesolade]

“People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

— Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No 1 (via elesheva)

[yvesolade]

“Sunday evening, winter morning, November dusk. We belong where love finds us.”

— Anne Michaels, from “Infinite Gradation”  (via existential-celestial)

[lifeinpoetry]

I realize that being a woman is a lot like being a planet—I can’t decide what my gravity attracts. I am as helpless as I am powerful. I am very powerful.

— Rita Feinstein, from Life on Dodge

[exit152]

it’s not love. it’s just hot outside.

[195195119511951-deactivated2021]

“To the Dead” Frank Bidart

[kdecember30-deactivated20201130]

“No matter who you are, all you are ever doing is leaving or being left or acting as the impetus to leave. Again, & again, & again. This is every story. This is the trinity.”

— GennaRose Nethercott, from The Lumberjack’s Dove (via bostonpoetryslam)

[lifeinpoetry]

In a high-school history class, white children raised their eyebrows when I raised my voice.

I don’t know what they thought I was capable of. I wish I was more capable of it.

— Zaina Alsous, from “Violence,” Lemon Effigies