KINGDOMS IN THE WILD

[shisasan]

June 7, 1924 Journals of Anais Nin 1923-1927 [volume 3]

[feral-ballad]

Taylor Byas, from I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times: Poems; “To the city I wish to get to know”

[feral-ballad]

Taylor Byas, from I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times: Poems; “The Therapist Asks Me, “What Are You Afraid Of?””

[Text ID: “The remembering hurt / more than the living because shame dials / in. You hearing me? I was naive enough / to think I could control a life. Even mine.”]

[feral-ballad]

Margaret Atwood, from The Door: Poems; “Europe on 5$ a day”

[Text ID: “I’ve cut myself off. / I can feel the place / where I used to be attached. / It’s raw, as when you grate / your finger. It’s a shredded mess / of images. It hurts.”]

[feral-ballad]

I have a crow inside me and no one can know. I can feel it all the time. It is like the entire night sky and all the stars and every beautiful sound you can imagine. It is like being too excited to sleep. It is like being twelve years old and stripping off my clothes outside in the rain. Savage. Girl. Suddenly awake to the deviance available in every ordinary moment. The possibilities of my current situation had not occurred to me before now. The freedom. There is a crow in my chest.

Anne de Marcken, from It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

[strokeofserenity]

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned.

[shisasan]

June 7, 1924 Journals of Anais Nin 1923-1927 [volume 3]

[lifeinpoetry]

A joke I was once told goes, I didn’t choose this life, this life chose me. Fuck that. Choose a hell of your own making over the hell that unmakes you. Flower a garden of rage & eat & eat & eat.

— Natalie Wee, from “Wei Ying Tells Me about Resurrection,” Beast at Every Threshold

[lifeinpoetry]

“From distance, I swallow the rain down to its slowest blade and still can’t / tell if I am the thinned silver of God’s fallen tongue or its bloody song.”

— Scherezade Siobhan, from “Sifar,” published in jubilat

[viperslang]

“Some days, a body grows like a cornflower in wheat fields where crows bend into melted knife-handles. We pass a way and the distance broadcasts its snowy whims in the shape of a tousled bedsheet.”

— Scherezade Siobhan, Viraha (Originally Published in Entropy)

[lifeinpoetry]

“How to detour your triggers? The post in post-traumatic stress disorder is unchaperoned, open to shelling at all times. This whole season is a wound-broken animal rubbing its bloodied hooves against the wired fence of a borderline.”

— Scherezade Siobhan, from “SSRI Love You (Inconvenience Regretted),” published in Burning House Press

[thewriterscaravan]

“Differential diagnosis. Meaning your pain labours under a pseudonym. Meaning something is hunting you from within with a wolfpack of newly readied teeth.”

— Scherezade Siobhan, “Anatomy-II” (Published in ANMLY Lit)

[soracities]

“Like any unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real when I’m not being touched.”

— Natalie Wee, from ‘Lonely’, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines

[thewriterscaravan]

“magic rising from / a man is prophesy / from / a woman is heresy / maybe he leaves me / a purloin of unsung fires”

— Scherezade Siobhan, from ‘echo’ (Published in Petrichor Journal)

[feral-ballad]

Julia de Burgos, tr. by Jack Agüeros, from Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos; "To Julia de Burgos"

[Text ID: "in all my poems I undress my heart."]

[feral-ballad]

Ama Codjoe, from Bluest Nude: Poems; “Bluest Nude”

[Text ID: “I crave. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”]

[ragewrites]