moonshadows poetry

“Is there no way out of the mind?” ― Sylvia Plath

[megairea]

Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to  Lou Andreas-Salomé, 8 September 1897 (tr. by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler)

[flowerytale]

Christina Rossetti, from "Echo", The Complete Poems

[feral-ballad]

June Gehringer, “EARTH IS AN ANAGRAM FOR HEART, U FUCKING IDIOTS”

[Text ID: “I don’t want to talk about it. / I want to lie in what little grass remains / and try to fit your heart inside of mine.”]

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

The hypocrisy of being human; the constant tug between solitude and company, the desire to love so desperately and simultaneously be detached from it all, of wanting everything and wanting nothing.

—mattmurdock-gf on Tumblr

[metamorphesque]

Hammond B3 Organ Cistern by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

[emmaconlon]

from Changing of the Tides & Other Poems by Emma Conlon

[moonshadowspoetry]

I use a trick to teach students

how to avoid passive voice.

Circle the verbs.

Imagine inserting “by zombies”

after each one.

Have the words been claimed

by the flesh-hungry undead?

If so, passive voice.

I wonder if these

sixth graders will recollect,

on summer vacation,

as they stretch their legs

on the way home

from Yellowstone or Yosemite

and the byway’s historical marker

beckons them to the

site of an Indian village—

Where trouble was brewing.

Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter.

Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred.

Where most were women and children.

Riveted bramble of passive verbs

etched in wood—

stripped hands

breaking up from the dry ground

to pinch the meat

of their young red tongues.

— Laura Da', "Passive Voice" from Tributaries

[transgender-history]

Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.

“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”

From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.

[totebagbisexual]

@chloeinletters on instagram

[moonshadowspoetry]

Who needs to be at peace in the world? It helps to be between wars, to die

a  few  times  each day to understand your father's sky, as you take it apart

piece  by  piece  and can't feel  anything,  can't  feel the tree growing under

your feet, the eyes poking night only to find another night to compare it to.

Whoever   heard   of   turning   pain   into   hummingbirds   or   red  birds—

haven't  we  grown?  What  does  it mean to be older?  Maybe a house with-

out  doors  can  still  survive  a  storm. Maybe I can't find the proper way to

rebel  or  damn it,  I can't  leave.  I want to,  but you grow inside of me. And

as  I  watch   you,  before  I  know  it,  I'm  too  heavy,  too full  of  you  to  move.

Maybe  that's what they meant when they said you shouldn't love a country

too much.

— Nathalie Handal, "Ways of Rebelling" from The Republics

[flowerytale]

Sharon Olds, from "Something Is Happening", One Secret Thing: Poems

[theoptia]

Marguerite Duras, from The Lover

Text ID: to devour and be devoured,

[moonshadowspoetry]

— from Good Poems for Hard Times edited by Garrison Keillor

[emmaconlon]

from Changing of the Tides & Other Poems by Emma Conlon

[moonshadowspoetry]

— Emily Dickinson, The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

[moonshadowspoetry]

— Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage

[emmaconlon]

this journey isn’t an easy one • via instagram @emma.conlon