i guess — i guess.

heaven is a muddy riverbank and you're covered in silt i track #mythologe

[mythologe]

call it whatever you want. call it a barking dog in a car, an old song as familiar as your hands. a wasp stinging your head. a crack in the glass, a fire burning in your throat. an old coat that smells of smoke. an empty bed. call it anything and make it pretty. call it whatever you want. you can call it something else but it doesn’t change what it is. this loneliness. this absence of love. you haven’t talked to anyone except your own family, grocery store workers. not for years now. you know life has forgotten you and moved on. you try to tell yourself it’s alright. it’s alright. it’s alright. it’s alright. it’s alright it’s alrightit’salrightit’salright. call it whatever you want. 

[mythologe]

will i ever come back into poetry? who knows. currently my hands feel like dead husks.

[yvesolade]

Full wild and gutted like brides on the hill, they say I touched my body like a tambourine until god gave it back. I was terror, terrified, hands stretched to shield the rivers behind them.

—Reyna N.A., from “All This Time”, in Thrice

[aseaofquotes]

Jennifer Hubbard, Try Not to Breathe

[heartcountry]

it was the year you forgot my birthday.  if anyone asks, that’s what i’ll tell them. the year the rain turned away from me. it seems so small now, but back then, the world was a war i was fighting. the trees all had shadows trying to ruin me. i tried to fix it. i even spoke to the birds, but they scattered like dandelion seeds. you wrote me a letter to tell me how lonely love was. i tried to retrace my steps to before it all happened, but our lives went on and our hearts never looked the same.  i had a phantom poem in my head that i promised to give you if you stayed. you didn’t. the poem did. after two more years of silence, i was still sorry. i pictured your ghosts, and they looked nothing like me. i imagined a world where i was big enough to at least haunt you. it was the same world you burned down in all your dreams. 

[mythologe]

i’m thinking about coming back to this blog. maybe. idk. i’m always exhausted and work is draining my soul but i miss writing poetry?

[mythologe]

there is no one in my bed so i say these things very quietly to my pillow-i love you, i’ll strip myself bare for you, i’ll kill everything that has ever hurt you and present it to you like a dog with a dead bird for its master. i grip the sheets tightly and whisper it all into the dark emptiness. in the morning, i realize: i spoke to nobody but me.

[mythologe]

if i thought you would see it i would post a wanted ad: / ‘wanted- that flutter in my throat. that shake in my knees. that afternoon i walked by your side / and thought about holding your hand.’ / give me that back. please, return that tenderness to me / i should have never handed it over/ like that. i never held your hand and yet you held my heart- / i thought you knew / i thought you knew / i thought you could see it that night we sat side by side / as a new year was birthed out of an old / and we traced each other’s pulses / i thought i screamed it loud when i cut off my shoulder length hair for you. i thought you knew. / you still hold all that half a state away but i want / it back now, so please / please respond.

[mythologe]

a man lays down in a barren cold field / head uncovered and shaking / his hands / gnarled, bare winter tree. / all that he has is his grief. his grief / is a starling in the road / dead. its brethren wheel above, screaming out his mourning for him. / his brother is dead, last of his blood. when all that you have is your grief / what does blood matter? what does any bond have over grief? / grief is the mouth that consumes & consumes, that never stops being hungry. a man is consumed by grief / & he looks for anything that will spit him back into his body.  

[weltenwellen]

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[primulaceas]

Ocean Vuong, "Thanksgiving 2006" from Night Sky with Exit Wounds

[weltenwellen]

Mary Oliver, from “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field”, Devotions

[ragewrites]

psalm lianna schreiber, december 7th, 2020

[scheharazade]

I am the knife which will slaughter heaven. Heaven is full of blood. Soon it will snow.

Heiner Müller, Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome (1984)

[lifeinpoetry]

I was never good at this body. 

There was always something in me so anxious to crawl out.

— kiki nicole, from NOBODY’S DAUGHTER

[andrivete]

Yves Olade, Kaiein (to burn)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

I imagine poets stitching the world together. Long silver threads of text. Lines prompting reading, dreaming minds not to see every thing by itself and separate, but to see the seams often unseen in the dark expanses across space and time. This is, perhaps, a kind of sorcery. A power not to wield, but to hold. To practice holding.

Ellie A. Rogers, from “Movements,” Ecotone: Reimagining Place (Fall/winter 2017)