[nervefood]

The proliferation of generative AI only makes writing more valuable, more beautiful, more worth the time. And it only makes me love it more.

[iprotectyou]

[huariqueje]

Wild Asparugus - Amanda Acker , 2023.

American , b. 1982 -

oil on muslin mounted on panel , 10 x 8 in.

[stpauligirl]

“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.”

— Ian McEwan, Lessons

[nervefood]

My first allegiance is to poetry; if I love anything else it's the poetry of it I love

[huariqueje]

The Pink House  -  Giovanni Giacometti , 1812.

Swiss , 1868-1933

Oil on canvas ,  90 x 104 cm.

[nervefood]

The needle-like leaves of conifers are designed to hold up to the snow. The descendants of the first trees to form forests—to copy themselves and begin the long trudge inland, where there was nothing—line the place I am from in time to remind me of my mother, the snowshoe hare I saw just once, my father, the blood on the roof of my mouth on the cold nights I walked as a child to the end of the earth for no reason

(The cold nights I walked to the end of the earth for no reason as a child

The cold nights I walked, for no reason, to the end of the earth as a child

The cold nights I walked for no reason, as a child, to the end of the earth

The cold nights I walked as a child, for no reason, to the end of the earth

The cold nights I walked to the end of the earth as a child, for no reason)

[nervefood]

Hi Zoe, my heart is filled with so much love and warmth lately, and this kind of energy has brought me back to you. I followed you since you were a teenager — I was the one who wished you a happy august 17th every year lol. I just want you to know how much your writing always meant to me. You will always be at the top of my mind when I think of my favorite poets. Somehow, you make the chaos of intellectual and emotional neurosis, the overwhelming awareness in being human, feel gentle and okay. The way you touch this world is so tenderly beautiful. Your courageous empathic soul and your raw, “god” given talent will always lead you to beautiful places! Thank you for all you’ve shared on this website over the years. I feel lucky to have found you.

- ghost girl ❤️

This is so incredibly kind. I don't know what to say, except thank you—for thinking of me, for sharing this, and for being here. I am so glad you are. I still think of you/those messages every August 17th!

[nervefood]

Flowers are the right size for imagining. I never loved Iowa more than that one week at the end of July, traipsing through hilly northeastern prairies, oil of mountain mint on the knees of all my field pants, sprigs of mountain mint in all my field shirt pockets, plastic clipboard under my left arm as I tallied the bees and wrote down the names of the plants they landed on—mostly bergamot, or bee balm, which I abbreviated as "BB". One morning we got rained out in the middle of a survey. We waited it out in the government truck and didn't see another bee for the rest of the day. I wondered where they went in the rain, if they weren't close to their nests; K, my boss for the week, didn't know either. This was the scale of our imagining: small, but big enough. The implications of my work were beautiful and clear. A few months later I took a botany class because I thought it would give me the same feeling—freedom from language, primarily. It didn't, but I liked sitting in the old lab for an hour or two several times a week, in the middle of beakers of aquatic ferns and tightly-packed drawers full of sixty-year-old prepared slides from Wisconsin. I liked imagining the textures of a life comprised of one more wildly-particular variety of close attention. A life that would most likely be available to me if I were to choose it continually for a few years, or to return to it occasionally for a decade or two, but not my first or only life. A life I could walk away from without losing anything real. One time after class my professor told me that after thirty-something years in Iowa he'd never "warmed up to" the prairie. I thought of our shared points of reference as children of the northeastern forests, a few decades and a few hundred miles apart. Sphagnum mosses, foliose lichens, teaberries, red efts. It comforted me that the landscape had stayed with him across all the years. Home is like that. A few minutes later I thought—but his children are from Iowa.

[psikonauti]

Józef Mehoffer (Polish,1869-1946)  

Pegaz wśród kwiatów (Pegasus among flowers), 1901

oil on canvas

[neshamama]

taqralik partridge, excerpt from “grape soda in the parking lot,” 2022

[heaveninawildflower]

Mixed flowers, Mont Louis (1925) by Margaret Mackintosh(MacDonald) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Watercolour, over graphite.

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

I was good with words, you with the gods.

Dave Smith, from “First School Day,” Looking Up: Poems 2010-2022 (Louisiana State University, 2022)

[filthybluecollar]

Visit Original Link

(1965) Jackson C Frank - “ Blues Run The Game ”

[fyp-science]

She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan, Contact

[bibliomancyoracle]

Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside

*

from “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica” by Bernadette Mayer,

[lifeinpoetry]

And the people in the slaughterhouse district where even the soil of their gardens is bloody and even the water in their pools is bloody and even the soles of their shoes are bloody why don’t they do something? Why don’t they do something?

— Forough Farrokhzad, from "Someone Who Is Like No One/کسی که مثل هیچکس نیست," Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season