all of the words.

now with pictures!

[notforlack]

“I am just carbon and bad timing.”

—

Neil Hilborn, from Clatter

Treat yourself to a copy of Clatter!

(via buttonpoetry)

[pdlcomics]

Feed the Animals

[licensedto-chill]

“I want the cottage. I want the green grass and the tomato plants. I want the peace in you; the front porch rocking chair lullaby; our cricket legs rubbing together under the covers. We can’t have it all. I know that, but humor me. We can’t have it all, but we can have most of it.”

— Caitlyn Siehl, from “Apple Pie Life” (via oofpoetry)

[macrolit]

“It is December, and nobody asked if I was ready.”

— Sarah Kay, poet (via macrolit)

[thunderstruck9]

Tomoya Tsukamoto (Japanese, b. 1982), Encounter, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 130 x 162 cm.

[savagedefectives]

larissa pham

[buttonpoetry]

“You take one pretty step and feel like you’re pouring bubbles into your own bloodbath. You don’t want a soft death. You want a hard life that is your life.”

— Andrea Gibson, from Lord of the Butterflies

[brennatwohy]

I swore I wouldn’t do this again, use magic as metaphor, call this heart anything more than what she is: a fool who’s forgotten every trapdoor she’s ever been led softly into.

but I do this trick; learned it from my grandfather, where I pass you two face-up Aces & tell you to hold them tightly as you can between two flat palms.

one night in early August, I dreamt we built a cabin in the Catskills.

if the bartender looked over, she might mistake it for a prayer. your pressed-together hands. the way the devil keeps his distance.

here, let me spoil this quickly: you’re holding both jokers & we haven’t been in this bar for months now. you drink your Jameson in a different city.

See how easy that was?

I might have wished you more honest, but then what would we have had in common?

back in the bar, I lean to kiss you halfway through a story about the chicken pox.

this is not the first time I’ve built a cabin.

There was a house where we kept all the pasta in big mason jars on the counter.

There was a house where I spilled grapefruit juice and no one yelled.

In some version of this story, you do not slip a future into my pressed-together palms and ask me to guess the thing between them.

but meanwhile, at that bar, your fingertips are all lined up. I’ve practiced years to make this part look easy. like I’ve done nothing.

like I could do this same trick again and again and again.

[notforlack]

"I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, twixt the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where 'I' does not exist, nor 'you', so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep." Pablo Neruda

[faithprayers]

[readmorepoets]

“but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.”

— Richard Siken, from “Seaside Improvisation”  (via kvngsla (via iliacl)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

I recognize that I love—you—by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.

Jacques Derrida, from The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 1987)

[brennatwohy]

when the crazy came back

she didn’t throw out all the dinners, spill the wine down my boring throat.

she didn’t look anything like the last time. didn’t pound the door in.

she knows this house too well by now, knows I’ll let her in by nightfall.

I could set my watch by the knocking. I plant dahlias in spring

& come October panic blooms in every window box, the crazy gathers it up.

washes a vase by hand. she has learned to be a gentle houseguest.

to seal the windows up for winter. we could almost forgive last autumn.

the pills from my dead grandmother’s purse, that man & his wedding ring,

the way the crazy called herself my name & I almost let her keep it.

this body knows fear like a front porch knows welcome, it is always coming home.

& you cannot pull the crazy out of me the way you cannot put a flower back to bed,

but this body knows withstand. knows what the morning looks like when she says stay.

the crazy is a quitter.

you have a perfect attendance record for this life.

& I will stay. & I will stay.

-Brenna Twohy, from Zig-Zag Girl

[notforlack]

oomph.

[lifeinpoetry]

i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence.

— José Olivarez, from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” Citizen Illegal

[gifdoctorwho]

[rohie-deactivated20191102]

“The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.

A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed.”

— Hunger Makes Me, Jess Zimmerman

[pdlcomics]

Good or Bad