wherein i reblog the writing of others

this is where i put things that other people wrote

[nosebleedclub]

“Onset” by Kim Addonizio

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers,   bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of   is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.   Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing. And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately I can’t stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers   of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs, even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me, the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything, my hands and eyes, yours; doesn’t that frighten you sometimes, remembering the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you, beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs, don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own; I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring   and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

[luthienne]

This is how I am. This is how love is—infinite time. Thankless and self-destructive.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke (via violentwavesofemotion)

[nahhhlina]

that frank still finds ways to get me

[lilcowgirl7-deactivated20210223]

It’s me that’s changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void–

Jack Kerouac, from Desolation Angels (via lonecowgirl1)

[jacqueslacan]

The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.

Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” (via jacqueslacan)

[endless-unfolding]

This much is known: the thread you never let go of guided you back. And when you emerged, years later, light hurt your eyes. Blood on your rusted blade was dry.

But what happened in the labyrinth? In deepest dark you grappled, felt its breath on your face, stabbed, and fled.

                A monster? Wouldn’t anything cry like that, pierced to the heart?

—Gregory Orr, “Investigation,” in City of Salt

[notbecauseofvictories]

Our Bodies Break Light

Traci Brimhall

We crawl through the tall grass and idle light, our chests against the earth so we can hear the river

underground. Our backs carry rotting wood and books that hold no stories of damnation or miracles.

One day as we listen for water, we find a beekeeper— one eye pearled by a cataract, the other cut out by his own hand

so he might know both types of blindness. When we stand in front of him, he says we are prisms breaking light into color—

our right shoulders red, our left hips a wavering indigo. His apiaries are empty except for dead queens, and he sits

on his quiet boxes humming as he licks honey from the bodies of drones. He tells me he smelled my southern skin for miles,

says the graveyard is full of dead prophets. To you, he presents his arms, tattooed with songs slave catchers whistle

as they unleash the dogs. He lets you see the burns on his chest from the time he set fire to boats and pushed them out to sea.

You ask why no one believes in madness anymore, and he tells you stars need a darkness to see themselves by.

When you ask about resurrection, he says, How can you doubt? and shows you a deer licking salt from a lynched man’s palm.

[medeae]

See, I will make you into a threshing sledge, new and sharp, with many teeth. You will thresh the mountains and crush them, and reduce the hills to chaff.

—The Holy Bible (NIV), Isaiah 41:15

[theoryoflostthings]

She said she meant that friends are like magic tricks but love is genuinely pulling someone in half.

Catie Rosemurgy, excerpt from Doctor: Miss Peach Is a Doll inside a Doll inside a Doll (via 7-weeks)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at / its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then. / The hideous vocabulary of mental science crushed her dazzling / star-thoughts into powder and brought her latent despair into the open air. / Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person—hidden like a laugh inside a sob—that loves even more than / it loves to live?

Fanny Howe, from Gone: Poems; Sometimes something feels Right: “Doubt,” (via lonecowgirl1)

[days-of-reading]

Mary Reufle, Cold Pluto

[booksquoteslove]

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum (via booksquoteslove)

[1672dykebrigade-deactivated2016]

‘i wanted to tell you’ marguerite duras “green eyes”

[archivedfever]

And the fields? Aren’t the fields changed by what happened?

The dead aren’t like us

How can the fields continue as simple fields?

Carolyn Forché, from The Angel of History (emphasis in the original)

[bettersituation]

[elisabethhewer]

ufos , elisabeth hewer

[nosebleedclub]

“Mexico Seen from the Moving Car” by Michael McClure

THERE ARE HILLS LIKE SHARKFINS                                  and clods of mud. The mind drifts through in the shape of a museum, in the guise of a museum dreaming dead friends: Jim, Tom, Emmet, Bill. —Like billboards their huge faces droop and stretch on the walls, on the walls of the cliffs out there, where trees with white trunks          makes plumes on rock ridges.

My mind is fingers holding a pen.

Trees with white trunks             make plumes on rock ridges. Rivers of sand are memories. Memories make movies             on the dust of the desert. Hawks with pale bellies             perch on the cactus, their bodies are portholes             to other dimensions.

This might go on forever.

I am a snake and a tiptoe feather at opposite ends of the scales as they balance themselves against each other. This might go on forever.