blue girls burn fast

[catilinas]

Anne Carson, from The Keats Headaches

[heartshop]

“[…] the knives in the kitchen are singing for blood, but we are the crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is a tenderness,”

— Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain

[gracebriarwoodwrites]

Why do the young poets  all write about Persephone? 

                               Maybe it’s because                                we can relate. 

To a goddess?

                               To being half                                sunshine                                and half                                grave. 

[heartcountry]

“I should have known but the water never told me. It sealed its blue lips after swallowing you, it licked my ankles like a dog. I won’t lie and say the ocean begged for forgiveness; it gleams unchanged in the sun. Some things are so big they take and take and remain exactly the same size.”

— Leila Chatti, “upon realizing there are ghosts in the water,” shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (via bostonpoetryslam)

[lifeinpoetry]

Her hair dark reeds                        or river snakes.                                             Her wet mouth the rupture between your name                        & what

                                  she made you.

— Natalie Wee, from “The Other Woman,” published in The Adroit Journal

[flakyseasalt-deactivated2020102]

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

— Audre Lorde from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, Sister Outsider (via fecundis)

[eli0tknight-deactivated20181203]

“I dare you to burn holes into me; I will bleed love and kindness from all of them, and you will drown in the things you tried to end in me.”

— Believe it, Eliot Knight

[pigmenting]

- Sagaree Jain, from “Border” published in The Offing

[ihoardwords]

“In the age of loss there is the dream of loss in which, of course, I am alive at the center—”

— Justin Phillip Reed, from “About the Bees,” published in Poem-a-Day (via lifeinpoetry)

[herpetologics]

hi i just wanted to say i really love your poetry!! i think its beautiful and i just really do like it. they all resonate with me for a long time after reading.

Hi thank you sm!!! You’re wonderful, thank you for sharing this with me, i really appreciate it. 💛

[lifeinpoetry]

Yes,

           there is a way            to define oneself            in this skin            without violence.

                                                  No,

           I have not            found said way,            yet. I know no metaphor            untethered to death.

— Hazem Fahmy, from “Hiding Skin” published in The Margins

[soracities]

A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

Ocean Vuong, from “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”, published in The New Yorker (via mesogeios)

[heartmagician]

You gotta dance to kill sometimes. Dance until it’s just you and the people you love and the life you’ve always wanted.

from THE DO-IT-YOURSELF GUIDE TO FIGHTING THE BIG MOTHERFUCKIN’ SAD by Adam Gnade (via heartmagician)

[pigmenting]

And I loved him          as I eventually came to                       love all artifacts of violence done to me.

– Leila Chatti, from “Liriope” published in Waxwing

[hopemovementau-deactivated20180]

I dream too much, and I don’t write enough, and I’m trying to find God everywhere.

Anis Mojgani (via pigmenting)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

You know why voices die in throats and trees struggle in silence: the deepest trauma cannot spare a sound.

Alice Fulton, from You Own It (via aishawarma)

[wordsnquotes]

I loved you the way the moon loves the sun, and maybe that was the problem. When one of us was up, the other was down, and no matter how brightly I wanted to shine, your glare was enough to put me in my place. You see, just like the moon feared the sun, I too, was afraid you would burn me.

Sydney Lynn,”Fear of the Sun” (via wordsnquotes)