Outlines!

[myownmelting]

[myownmelting]

from That Which Comes After

I’ve got to stop thinking

In status updates

Cut the avocado before

It turns I read this poem

I wanted to tweet about

The right or left brained

Quiz but I wasn’t surprised

The result came back positive

For night terrors in childhood

I’d wake up screaming I still

Remember the storyline

But I’ll keep it brief

The night you held me

On the floor was the last

Time I let you hold me

I think violence might be

More intimate but it’s not

Sustainable sometimes it scars

Spices were used to cover up

The rot can you imagine

Life without refrigeration

And I think I have a tender

Belly now I’ll touch myself

Briefly & maybe breathe out

Your name is very ordinary

Have you ever met someone

You’ve never met before

[stuffedanimalpurse-deactivated2]

Yoko Ono

[myownmelting]

“Anti Paradise” by Zoe Dzunko in Shabby Doll House

[lollobridgeta-deactivated202203]

“But do you think you’re free?

I think I recognize the patterns of my nature.

But do you think you’re free?

I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.” —Louise Glück, “Mutable Earth”

[myownmelting]

Liz Bowen

[myownmelting]

[myownmelting]

Caroline Crew

Plastic Sonnet 14

  It's almost lunch. Today has released things into themselves: ash water, milk curdle, thrum.

This is the finite kingdom your heart has made—

a creature might forget to weep in such florid weather.

Yet I dispraise this darkness you busted, my civil tongue knotted in a waiting decade.

In line we wait with the trick in mind. Cascade light— talk esteem, say everyone around you is a one true love & then ten & then on.

      Plastic Sonnet 15

  we two look two ways looking for bees to find another cavity this is a major flaw

I look on the whole thing from the sidelines the soul that flies away from the body

I look weird because I started to fail as you would look if wearing satin to a river

please do not blame me please do not accuse me of wearing the same sunlight

shut me safe & most divine in this the outside air

      Plastic Sonnet 16

  Architect of my hot sugar do not make me for the high rise build big & low on this bloody earth

I shake down alone you can keep your classic high all night

what do I care for stature so saturated in this mud my sweet home water

why conquer a horizon when there is flex in lifting upward as in crushing low

do not forget the basement fielding this purple this red & tight heart where records are lost

      Plastic Sonnet 17

  strike up & strike the general direction while I'm at either remember there are sad songs you should choose better it is only that idiot god that gets you haphazard which is to say you make my screen heavy reading you can click to occupy the public places never spit on my pity documents & I will keep you as fine memory foam in a tomb that is half dust & all electricity cave come on darling be used

[whatmountains]

I have three poems in the new Zoozoomophone Review here: http://issuu.com/zoomoozophone_review/docs/zr3

Also poems by diannadragonettiisdead and wonderpunch and too many other beauties to name.

[tinyghosthands]

Kelly Schirmann, from Activity Book, published by NAP

[ohproserpine-deactivated2015053]

I call it sex because I don’t know how else to sayterrified of dying. Silence ruins everything. It says: you will not get your wings this way not the wings you want and you want more than anybody. I have wanted many unfair things. What is most unfair is that the Earth is still okay with me being here I think, and even encourages it. Hello ocean, you have asked me not to die, but I swim in neon pools that are happy to kill me.

Melissa Broder, Satisfy the Desolate (via camilla-macauley)

[greenfinch]

1 My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the face his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing! then I can put on my clothes I guess, and walk the streets. 2 I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist. Words! be sick as I am sick, swoon, roll back your eyes, a pool, and I’ll stare down at my wounded beauty which at best is only a talent for poetry. Cannot please, cannot charm or win what a poet! and the clear water is thick with bloody blows on its head. I embrace a cloud, but when I soared it rained. 3 That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks what a funny place to rupture! and now it is raining on the ailanthus as I step out onto the window ledge the tracks below me are smoky and glistening with a passion for running I leap into the leaves, green like the sea 4 Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.

"Mayakovsky" by Frank O’Hara (via greenfinch)

[myownmelting]

from "Kinged" by Graham Hunter Gregg

one stab lowers itself into the body

i buy wounds i own yours

       •  

a red comet sprayed the wrecked wall they made me wash it my mother said wash your hands for dinner my teacher was killed today i wash my hands the moon lights a cigarette in resignation

        •  

i have been a murderer since i was eight i have not saved anyone since i was twelve experience is hard to explain bodies around me are drowning are not are you dying a little

       •  

grass cooling my temples i thought of miklos how all i wanted was to hold miklos bodies on top of bodies he wanted to smile at and in death with what little warmth you have left please hold miklos

       •  

you tell me  that i am only  one person why some small person please tear up this body with hands

       •  

a night before we lost our gods we put a candle in the wall but nothing lit the last success the way fire says fear the way it says human in the morning we will stand as bodies

       •  

this is a daymare a dead meadow full of its name i find myself closing eyes buttoning coats bandaging children finding replacing limbs re-membering i don’t know why i turn them all over we face the sun

       •  

i want to beat you into you with you into i am there to carve my place inside of you to rest inside the hollow i have made big ugly and safe i am the ambulance’s afterthought the forgetful emergency you were the kind that collapses crushing the flit of yellow you are my one slow black 

       •  

s'il vous plait we are this whiting out this something French in italics this painting is a de Kooning this museum is dying in tongues in this elongated please before you can find this i ghost

[myownmelting]

"Warnings," Chris Taylor

Your household will be light

enough to breath into

and out of like a paper sack.

Burnt toast until the day

you die. Itching groin. Fecund

moths whose young will thud down

on your lovemaking.

You will call it lovemaking.

Your spoons will curl inside your cheek

of their own volition. They are real spoons.

You will only say heavy words henceforth--

"Saltgrass," or "Maundering," or "But."

Nothing good on TV. Your son screams

when he mows the lawn

or does calculus. A great number of dead

rabbits forthcoming.

You wake up eyeless and mean,

but self-flagellating, so that's fine.

Then she'll turn her hair electric so you can't

brush it for her. This happens in year

six. The dog runs off then, too, and the tomatoes

come up shaped like biopsies.

Across the jacuzzi's smoke there's fire,

the kind that grabs hold

and just runs in every possible direction at once.

[jvtng]

At some point it becomes true that all stories are love stories. all making, love making. I didn’t make this rule. but it binds me all the same. I wish there were a law against condescending against love. against the economy of fear that says your joy means less joy for me as if love were pie, or money, or fossil fuel dug or pumped from the earth, gone when it’s gone. it’s just not true. the heart with its gift for magnificent expansion is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar cringing in its wallet. when you say darling, the world lights up at its edges. when mouths find mouths and minds follow or minds find minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow – how about you call that sacred. how about you raise your veined right hand and swear on the blood that branches there, yes. I take this crush to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy until the bending’s its own pleasure. I will memorize photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance, and dance – there’s a perfection only the impossible kiss possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked in the dark of a room to which you will never return. anything that moves the world toward light is a blessing. why not take it with both hands, lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this is the substance that holds our little atoms together into bodies. this sweet paste of longing is all that binds us to the earth. and all we know of the gods.

Marty McConnell, “Three of Cups” (via cosmicspread)

[lablablabs-deactivated20181204]

3 new poems at Potluck

[sarahjeanalex]

so so good

[keywrites]

He says: I’m Muslim. As he brings the double shot of rum to his lips. I imagine the way it burns as it slides down his throat. He winces, then smashes the glass against table. Everyone turns and cheers, then they go back to their conversations. He says it again — I swear. I say: I know. He looks at me with sad eyes. Wallahi - he says, still trying to convince me. I say: I know. I watch his eyes turn to glass as he downs another. I swear I am Muslim - he slurs I say: I know. No— he says— you’re judging me, look and he holds his hands over his ears and he begins to recite. And I put my hand over his as people begin to stare. And I say: I know. And he begins to cry, and his tears look ancient, and his face contorts, and his mouth is open but there is no sound, and his body shudders. And he tries again and again, never getting past Bismillah. He keeps on saying “No you don’t understand I am Muslim, I am Muslim, I am Muslim, I am Muslim” I know, I say. And he holds the bottle to his mouth and he almost swallows it whole, and he says “marry me Aasiyah, I am a good man, my father is a hafiz of Quran, it is just this Dunya, it is this world that has killed me” I know, I say I know.

Key Ballah, an encounter. (via keywrites)

Damn.

(via yourcupofcoffee)