split your lip for tenderness

s.k. osborn | twenty-four | alt: @sleepyaches

[insteadofdisappearing]

Yea…

[primulaceas]

Mary Oliver, "Thirst" from Devotions

[insteadofdisappearing]

Can’t even read a whole poem lately bc if so I might feel emotion and possibly die!

[luthienne]

Hieu Minh Nguyen, from This Way to the Sugar: Poems; “Teacher’s Pet”

[Text ID: I could be a liar. I could be remembering / the wrong details. Details. Details: her office is still / a lost thing. Darkness holding the ember hostage. / There is nothing in this story that’s not a dagger.]

[serratedpens]

Catherine Pierce

[lifeinpoetry]

Someone will probably love you for who you are. If not, you’ll still find friends, friends who, given time, or given warning, will probably gather around you, hold your hands, and wrap you in soft coats and blankets till the violence inside your body ends.

Someone will probably love you for who you are, not just for who you labor to be. Maybe you’re lost in your skin today. Maybe you’re burning and wish you could tear it all off. Please don’t. You are variously a marvel, an athlete, a wilderness, a source of warmth and a way to learn from fear.

— Stephanie Burt, from "Prayer for Werewolves," We Are Mermaids

[goosefeathered]

i was sixteen for twenty years

[insteadofdisappearing]

unluckiest girl in the world (draft) | s.k.o. | 11.11.22

[insteadofdisappearing]

i love u $5 vintage tank top i love u rocky horror picture show i love u autumn i love u mountains i love u poetry

[malojasnake]

— Sunrise, by Louise Glück

[feral-ballad]

Claire C. Holland, from I Am Not Your Final Girl: Poems; “Ginger”

[Text ID: “I got cursed, in every way a / woman can. / You kill yourself, over and over, / to be different.”]

[iamhavingsomuchfun]

catastrophe is next to godliness by franny choi

[saintsebastiensbf]

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

George Sand, in a letter to Gustave Flaubert

Nikki Giovanni, Mirrors

Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters

Mary Oliver, Dogfish

on choosing kindness. again and again.

[jovialtorchlight-deactivated202]

restful dream 

[lesbianherstorian]

“want” from cold river: poems by joan larkin, october 1997 

[ololygas]

Mary Oliver

[apoemaday]

Ways of Being Lonely

by Kim Addonizio

Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over. Like a taxidermied grizzly in the student union. You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear. That time with him in Houston. Sometimes you flame into a scary flower. An eruption of coherence in the postmodern seminar. You stand in a shallow creek and your reflection floats slowly downstream without you. Alcohol is your emotional-support animal. The fan hums erratically. An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the baggage carrousel. Like an amoeba without an e-scooter. An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-Equity horse. You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel. A Zen koan growing in the White House Rose Garden. Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of an abandoned friendship. You’re the queen, but you’re a bee being swept into the pool’s filtration system. Like a version, touched for the very last time. Spooky piano music rising from the dishwater. You wake up alone to a bird reciting Keats.