magnoliaison

blue in my feathers

[dostoyevsky-official]

[feral-ballad]

Alda Merini, tr. by Susan Stewart, from Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini; “Will I be alone?”

[Text ID: “And maybe I will rip out by the roots / my postponed hope for love,”]

[magnoliaison]

Is there, under my lame tongue, a word that means the milk-sweet smell of my child's hair from those first days when we thought we'd remember everything? A word that brings the plunge of blood from head to groin during that first kiss? Is it enough to know that they existed, holding the empty word like a vial whose perfume has dried up? [...] I sing myself to sleep with ABC and cling to the useful letters that spell milk and kiss, knowing they'll feed me when there is nothing else.

— Deborah Burnham, from 'Forgetting'.

[magnoliaison]

— 'Receptor' by Ashley Blanton.

[muguetdemai]

Caitlyn Siehl, What We Buried; from "A Letter To Love"

[nontemporary]

JOHN ZIMMERMAN

[magnoliaison]

I will not consider death a contractual violation. Let my cancer be the slow-growing kind so I will have all the time I need   to backstroke over the rocks and little fishes, looking upwards through my bronze-tinted goggles into the vaults and rafters of the oaks, as the crows exchange their morning gossip   in the pale mutations of early light. It was worth death to see you through these optic nerves, to feel breeze through the fur on my arms to be chilled and stirred in your mortal martini. — Tony Hoagland, from 'Barton Springs'.

[feral-ballad]

Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, from The Most Foreign Country; “I am…”

[Text ID: “my wings? / two rotting petals”]

[beweme]

Harry Grundy

[magnoliaison]

So many days like flaring cinders in an uncle's bleak periphery, like duets in hawthorn shade or conspiratorial archeology. We examined the samples. We yanked the dumbwaiter's rope. No one spoke of cirrus clouds or uncouth implements unleashed upon the meadow. There was much to do. The sagebrush swayed. What did Alice say to Edgar? It wasn't time to yield but to focus.

— Christopher Brean Murray, from 'The Map'.

[luthienne]

Mahmoud Darwish, from Journal of an Ordinary Grief (tr. from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi)

[Text ID: A place is not only a geographical area; it's also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood.]

[magnoliaison]

Trichome stain of rockfish gill section, @histoqueenofhearts on Instagram.

[magnoliaison]

And I’m not sorry you’re here and in front of me and breathing and eating. If you’re Bacchus, where’s my wine? Where were you when I was naked, offering a thousand dinners in my tiny kitchen? How’s my birthday lamb? Oh, brutal. Delicious.

— Analicia Sotelo, from 'Apologia over Marinated Lamb'.

[magnoliaison]

— John Green, from "The Anthropocene Reviewed".

[magnoliaison]

Kathakali performers applying stage makeup.

[geryone]

Headless John The Baptist Hitchhiking, C.T. Salazar

[magnoliaison]

“Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch. It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still. The woman does exactly that. Signals rain down around her like seeds.

[...]

All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.”

— Richard Powers, from "The Overstory".