I make my own oceans.

I am Ella. I am a word warrior, a love advocator, and a maker of all things beautiful (i.e. the waffle, the friendship, the poem).

[battledfield-blog]

Human beings are made of water we were not designed to hold ourselves together rather run freely like oceans like rivers

Beau Taplin  (via thatkindofwoman)

[lifeinpoetry]

Make love to me in Spanish. Not with that other tongue. I want you juntito a mí, tender like the language crooned to babies. I want to be that lullabied, mi bien querido, that loved. I want you inside the mouth of my heart, inside the harp of my wrists, the sweet meat of the mango, in the gold that dangles from my ears and neck. Say my name. Say it. The way it’s supposed to be said. I want to know that I knew you even before I knew you.

Sandra Cisneros, “Dulzura,” Loose Woman: Poems (via lipfused)

[alonesomes]

Stop. You can’t love me because you’re lonely, or because I am the only one who doesn’t piss you off. I want to piss you off, I want to get on your fucking nerves. I don’t want the responsibility of always being your rock. I will try, but I’m a mess, too. I lie, I sleep too much and I don’t like children under the age of 6, really. I don’t even know if I want kids because I’m selfish, and mothers can’t be selfish once they decide to carry another life. I’m always looking for the rain to come so I trip over my own feet. I know exactly what the air smells like before a storm. Before you fall in love with me, I want you to know that I cry a lot because it feels good, and I masturbate at least 4 times a week, and you might fall out of love with me before either of us are ready for it. I have no experience with this. I’m trying to be brave and smart but its almost impossible to be both at the same time. You can’t love me like a fire escape. Sometimes I will be the match, or the smoke under the door. I don’t know what I’m doing, all I know is that we all catch fire sometimes, before we even get warm. Before you fall in love with me, I want you to know that there’s a 50% chance that this won’t work, that one of us will wind up hating the other. I will try to keep your head above water, but sometimes I’ll need help, too. I can’t be your savior, and I don’t expect you to be mine. Just watch me unfold and I’ll watch you unfold, too. We’ll get drunk and tell each other everything. I know that’s cheating but maybe it’ll be alright. Maybe we won’t wake up embarrassed. I am going to fall in love with you, too, feet first. Maybe we’ll slow dance off a building together, maybe we’ll have forgotten each other’s names by this time next year. I don’t care, the sky is gray with or without you, so I’m not going to look up anymore, I’m going to look ahead .

before you fall in love with me | Caitlyn S.  (via 5000letters)

[explore-blog]

Out comes the whip. We’re lazy, stuck, worthless. Our ideas are shallow, uninteresting, tepid. What’s our problem? Why can’t we just crank out pages like some literary version of a well-oiled machine? I’ll tell you why not. Because this writing thing is hard. It always feels good to have written, but it rarely feels good to sit down to write. If I were to describe my own physical process, it’s like a nearly-unbearable tension within me slowly begins to rise. A welling up of so many thoughts and feelings that it feels I might explode. And yet, at the same time, there is the seeming impossibility of finding the words, of knowing what’s next, of getting it right. Shoulders tense. Jaw tightens. Eyes sting. Breath becomes shallow. Mind buzzes in circles endlessly. The page is a solid wall at which I must run, full tilt, and only by running, only by hurling myself straight at it might it crumble and give way. But it appears so solid! So unforgiving! Sometime I bang against it, and limp away, bruised and bloody. Other times, it turns out the wall was just a mirage. But there’s only one way to find out. […] So. How to begin? Improbably enough, we must begin with kindness.

The brilliant Dani Shapiro, a modern sage of the pleasures and perils of writing and the creative life, reflects on getting to work.

Complement with Shapiro on why creativity requires leaping into the unknown and her spectacular conversation with Debbie Millman.

(via explore-blog)

[victoriousvocabulary]

It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Robert Hass (via victoriousvocabulary)

[jellyfish--spines]

Poetry Collections: Anis Mojgani at TEDxAtlanta

[tinyghosthands]

I have three new poems published in Hobart today!

[alonesomes]

I don’t want anything from him
except his red apple heart.
Something I can bite into quickly
without making a mess. If you asked him, he’d claim he’s never met anyone kinder, so please don’t say anything about this. All I want from him is his love.
The fruit of it. The sweet stuff.
All I want is to keep it inside of me
and then move along, because
I don’t like being touched more than I liked being looked at. Is it so terrible that I want
to be bigger than him? That I
don’t want to want more than
I need from a person?
I don’t think that’s bad, but
people keep telling me to
apologize for chewing with my
mouth open, so what am
I supposed to do with a whole
heart in there?
How am I going to eat it quietly? Just give me the thing with no
hands so that I can go to sleep
without them around my neck.
I don’t want the body of love
like I used to. I don’t want to 
be kissed. Well, maybe I do, but not now. When I close my eyes, I’m a statue that he wants to run his tongue over. When I close my eyes, I cut it off and keep it.

Caitlyn Siehl, Eyes Closed (via alonesomes)

[wintertangerine]

Fifty yards away and you can still hear someone’s world seem to twist in their shaky hands. I didn’t realize how it sounded until after you called the therapist. There’s a clinical term, it feels more like the signs across your chest read WELCOME TO, WELCOME TO, never WELCOME HOME, never WELCOME HOME. You tell me you don’t understand. Divide. Separate. Consume. I am to the top, shaking full of light. Swallow. Moonrock skull, fingers like coffee filters, tongue swimming with Tylenol, clear. I go weeks just letting the phone ring, burying the bottles like translucent orange explosives. Rise. Wash clean. Stomach acid full of hornets, the finite of the body above the resolve of concrete. Every word sounds like a death threat. Open. Close. I pen out letters to my insides but can’t speak the language that hisses and spits. Boil. Simmer. Burn. From far enough away, no one can see the tremors in your throat. You ask me how this feels. I could show you, but the mind is a prism. It hurts invisibly. Iron. Align. Refract. You do not understand why my eyes well up on certain sidewalks, why my skin crawls at my own name. Control. Perform. Conclude. You ask me how to see my kind of sick, but I cannot show you a suffering that always runs clear.

PRISM by Julia Faulkner, Winter Tangerine Review, Volume Three  (via wildflowerveins)

[germyradin-deactivated20150823]

Another Lucille Clifton poem that feels too goddamn appropriate too much of the goddamn time.

[buttonpoetry]

Fatimah Asghar // “Red”

"Lover, I’m not afraid of the red drip budding between my thighs."

"Red" is an award-winning hand-drawn animation created by Loveholdletgo, written by Fatimah Asghar of Dark Noise Collective. Co-directed by Beyon and Jess X Chen. Sound design by Anders Link, and Music by Beyon and Milo & Otis.

 ”Red” was screened nationally at the 2014 Asian American International Film Festival, Animation Block Party, and received awards from Yale Environmental Film Festival, Asians on Film, and more.

[wintertangerine]

Wishing I were bigger than these moments, smothered in hands, passing through my old bodies, shedding a luscious fur that drips from my shoulders like a whore in a girlie magazine, wishing I were greater than desire, so over its poesy whatever, wishing you hadn’t left me in June, wishing you were here, kissing me goodbye in the porch light. It’s a sweet montage, we’re laughing ugly and smiling at each other,the night expanding like a lung. So we drive with all the windows down, grinning into the blue, legs crossed, not both of them mine, the car sliding down the road like a streaming blotch on a reel of film. Lying on Sol’s couch, soft and molted, palming my phone, your phantom weight on my stomach, trying to send this, hoping at the very least to startle you into love, not love with me, but love as a verb, hoping you’ll see the bullshit in that sentence, regretting this already.

TEXTS FROM LAST NIGHT, by Gabriella Gonzales, Winter Tangerine Review, Volume Three  (via wildflowerveins)

[jamesleaf-deactivated20151208]

the headline reads: ENTIRE WORLD ACHES AND CARRIES ON whistle and throw fists, singing in the noose. the Last Supper delayed the inevitable, but it was sweet so sweet. with how often everything burns, you’d think we would all be firefighters by now. blow out the candle, the candles, the forest, and wish the cake endless, but eat it with fork and plate, back straight, hands clean, where’s your napkin?? if you dive in head first, you’ll break your parents expectations. yeah, the water is that shallow. no, you’ll never get them back. the lifeguards here never learned to swim. we drown those who do, i think i think i think i think maybe because struggle is the only natural state or statement like a heat death baseball bat in the middle of sex. everybody wants a gun but no one wants the ammo. POW POW, BANG BANG, the city’s still standing, the army’s still drinking, the congress’s still sleeping, the table still has legs, wobbly they may be. fill and pour fill and pour. we have gone sour. does he realize how long he’s been away? if you want seconds, you’ve got to earn them. if you want wholeness, you’ve got to die.

"the newspapers of the future" by james leaf (via jamesleaf)

[yeahwrite]

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!

—Henry David Thoreau, as quoted in The New Yorker article “Why Walking Helps Us Think" by Ferris Jabr, Sept. 3, 2014.

This article could also be titled “Why Walking Helps Us Write”. I’ve started doing most of my writing on my iPhone, while walking through the city to and from work each day, so it really resonated with me!

(via yeahwriters)

[moth-boy]

The words “I Promise” and “Forever” begged me not to use them but sometimes I don’t listen to God, so You can imagine how much it hurt to let your last birthday pass with no word. On August 3rd You weren’t the only one comin’ up lonesome. Listen, if I had to make a list of everything everywhere -and I mean everything…everywhere- the very last thing to do on that infinite list of every-single-thing-would be-to hurt You, so I need you to know that in an attempt to keep my promise I did write a letter to You on Your birthday. It was covered in stickers of flock-printed stars, choir claps, and a bonfire of buttercups stuck in the air, but when I finally drew enough courage to send You all the Love in the World my hand snapped off in the mailbox from clenching. It was returned to me with a gospelstitch, a hope stamp and a note etched into the palm I had to pry open with the pressure of pitching doves reminding me we agreed to let each other go.

Buddy Wakefield, Giant Saint Everything (via moth-boy)

[kdecember-deactivated20161201]

I go to sleep and wake up different. You make a lengthy drive across Iowa to find the other end of Iowa, its fields hung silent in iron sky. Claims are always being made about precision. If I were a bird I would mean to be the small kind. What is going on in that room where no one lives? It might fill itself with delicate things, some very nice iron bowls, twelve miniature trees all of them aflame. Listen, Cody. How many times did they tell you you’d never make it? One day is never longer than the next untangling film from a canister. Somebody means to measure you by needle and light. I take a quiet kind of panic to the river.

wendy xu, It’s Almost My Birthday Don’t Tell Anyone

  (via thefogsaid)

[backshelfpoet]

I. Two poets fall in love, and that’s when it gets ugly. II. We go to dinner. You order the wine, red and burning, and it goes down like blood. We start with Shakespeare, move to Plath. You use alliteration to tell me that I’m ripping out your lungs with my metaphors, and I counteract with a hyperbole, say you’ve clogged my arteries with your similes. Don’t touch me with your dictionary, I want to say. Touch me with your hands. III. The appetizers arrive. Bread as soft and brown as the flesh of your neck. Move to Emerson. Ask about God. Was Jesus this soft and brown? My Bible never told me about the strength in your apricot arms, your chestnut knuckles, this most divine truth resting under your skin. Move to Whitman. I envy the grass that licks your neck when you tumble down hills and watch the clouds. Touch me with your hands. IV. The main course is a fawn’s heart seasoned with autumns and breaking. I eat more than you do. Move to Rilke. Write letters. When I tell you about the words, you say that you will die for ink and paper: I want you to break my neck. Move to Allen. Kiss the sunlight. Ask to live. Touch me with your hands. V. Dessert is your mouth at three a.m., pulled over to the side of an empty, dark highway. Tell me you love me and it goes down like blood. Kiss my hip and it feels like dying. Don’t touch me with your dictionary. Touch me with your hands.

Two Poets Fall In Love, And That’s When It Gets Ugly | d.a.s (via backshelfpoet)