From Io to Orion

Jack Delong, Edmonton AB. 24, queer gal. Trapped between Orion and his dogs

[io-to-orion]

Of Course

I expected too much of you and your hands,

How good you’d be a wringing, washing, scrubbing, blotting out.

Of course,

All the white gossamer in the world can’t undo the red of the sun,

Of course.

Of course hate will leave claw marks in the most secretive parts of you,

Will shave away strips of your question mark curves until all you can be is exclamation,

And cure you like clay into hard shapes that cannot be undone,

Of course.

But love can leave you with nothing but roiling guts,

Take a bite from you like a glacier slices through the appalachians

And leave behind nothing but naked hillside.

So I thought you could save me from all my sins

But you’re not the type of god who can even hear prayers,

And all my supplications bought me nothing,

All my pilgrimages to your temples left me nothing but salt on my lips,

Of course.

Of course there was nothing I could get from you but that which your body couldn’t help but give,

Of course you couldn’t exonerate me of all the transgressions I was still committing.

Of course love is not the same as atonement

And what I was looking for in you wasn’t love anyways,

Of course.

[orionsdogs]

Anyways I dont post here anymore

Insta @terrible.animal is where I'm posting for now

[wnq-quotes]

Reena B. | Twelve Months and how they lived inside my body

@wnq-quotes

[sometimestuesday-deactivated202]

What are some of your favorite poems or stories? Like the name of them or something lol, I'm very curious 😂

I actually happen to have a list of my fave poems in my drafts so I can read them whenever I want, so here ya go: 

Slow Dance by Matthew DickmanOne Last Poem for Richard by Sandra CisnerosA Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out by Richard SikenMayakovsky’s Revolver by Matthew DickmanOther Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem by Bob HicokDedication by Franz WrightPhantom Limbs by Anne MichaelsPittsburgh by Ali ShapiroMissing Words by Peter BoyleThere Are Birds Here by Jamaal MayWhat the Living Do by Marie HoweSmall Hands by Lucy TivenElegy Owed by Bob HicokFrida Kahlo to Marty McConnell by Marty McConnellSo I Locked Myself Inside a Star for Twenty Years by Jeremy RadinLove by Matthew DickmanSnow and Dirty Rain by Richard SikenCommencement Speech Delivered to an Audience of One by Matthew OlzmannUntitled (Blue, Green, & Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952 by Ocean VuongKingdom Animalia by Aracelis GirmaySo I Know by Bob Hicok

[lunch-poems]

[punlovsin]

….

[soracities]

Denise Levertov

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“Because imagery is so effective a device in poetry, and because an image gives the reader a very specific touch of detail, poets learning the craft sometimes get the idea that detail of any kind makes for good poetry. In fact, lines of plain detailed description–of an old building or a field of flowers or of a mountain range or how one picks strawberries–can be deadly to a poem and except from the hands of an excellent writer of prose almost never sounds new to us. One focused image or one sweeping suggestion will do a lot more to keep a poem your own than will detailed description. Remember that suggestion always triggers the imagination; description almost never does.”

Miller Williams, from “Writing Your Own Poems,” Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It (Louisiana State University Press, 2006)

[abcdefg2789-deactivated20201122]

The only word I am able to associate with you is almost. Almost. Almost. You almost happened to me. I almost had you. I am thinking of the electricity in the air before your favourite band comes on stage, like a sting, and how being with you was kind of like that. I cannot look at a piano without seeing your fingers ease gently into them. I forget most things except for your hands, your slender wrist, your silver watch. Yesterday I held someone just to see what another body would feel like. All I could feel were bones and muscle. I have to believe that the absence of someone feels like the neighbourhood tree has been cut down and all the children realise how empty everything is. But then the sky turns a mirage of orange and the ice cream truck sings its eerie song and eventually everything is beautiful again.

jessica therese, “Almost” (via jessicapoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

I am a country of such tender lust. A place where birds deliriously beat their wings, where golden fish tremble in a lake of tongues.

Jeremy Radin, from “Koi,” Slow Dance with Sasquatch  (via a-witches-brew)

[orionsdogs]

Hey followers,

Hey! I’ve been having some writers block! Last year I asked you guys for prompts and it was great! Please consider sending me some more :) even one word is great! I’d really appreciate the help!

[patsywalkera]

Caitlyn Siehl, from Crybaby

[writingsforwinter]

Freud Comes Back to Life to Analyze the Women’s March

In the 1800s, Jean-Martin Charcot created a separate ward

at La Salpêtrière Hospital for women suffering from hysteria.

That’s what they called it then -

bodies broken into dance, grief so dark

it swelled like honey. They say that when the earth

learned of Pangaea, it cried.

That when women learned of men, they died.

In the ward, so many girls with knives

held between their teeth, and when

they were loud, when their voices swayed like windows,

the doctors did things

most of us can never speak of.

An octopus has three hearts.

A cat has nine lives.

A woman so easily runs out of tries.

There are so many ways for us to disappear.

[orionsdogs]

New Blog Info

I’ve gotten a few (read:2) msgs about whether or not I’ve started a new writing blog (probably because of the decrease in poems I’ve been posting??) the short answer is YES.

If you want the new url pls msg me, as I don’t want to make it public to everyone! Thanks!

[orionsdogs]

Reasons

I live for you,

Mostly.

But also to one day know what it’s like to look back and crave youth,

To be young and feel things that are still new,

To learn about what makes you bite your arm;

I live because I have not yet had enough of growing up.

 Also,

There are still things I’ve promised to get better at.

And I haven’t had the chance to regret enough,

To think of the children I had or didn’t have.

I haven’t had enough time to feel, and then forget,

What it’s like to kiss her.

 And what about growing my hair?

Not much, but long enough to run my fingers through it.

And didn’t I promise to send you more letters?

And didn’t we say we’d kiss next time we met?

I live for many things,

But mostly because I’d like for us to meet again.

[orionsdogs]

On not Being the Bigger Person

I want to say

I forgive you

And

I don’t hate you,

And

What you did to me didn’t turn me into

Something I don’t like to look at,

But I can’t.

I want to forgive,

But I have turned out to be a small person,

Which of course is my fault,

But also maybe in part the world’s

For being so big.

[orionsdogs]

Shoulds

Mother,

I understand why you don’t want to believe me,

The boyfriends I brought home and paraded about like toys on a string.

But of anyone you should know about the things that one should do, and what one wants to do,

And how the women in our family tend to lean,

Like wind beaten trees,

Towards the “shoulds”.

 Like your mother,

Who stood over the well of insanity until loneliness pushed her in.

Who might have done better if she’d only been let go of,

Who loved your father even though he wouldn’t set her free.

And you who worked day and night unending,

Until your hands were rough and worn,

Until you knew weariness better than you knew your own children.

We are a company of women who do what they should at loss of everything else.

 But along with all this, like genetic markers, are still the places we slipped up:

Your mother crying on the floor in the farmhouse with you looking on,

Bread and butter for dinner and knowing that she is still lonely and you are not enough.

And the days of my life you slept through,

The things that were burning me alive that I kept quiet so I wouldn’t wake you,

So that I wouldn’t have to see your heavy eyes and feel guilty.

I had slip ups too.

 Mondays at school where after weekend parties people were whispering about me,

Caught kissing girls but not in the same way the rest of them were.

Not drunk in the middle of the kitchen,

Smiling as the party cheered them on,

Never walking off after laughing, feeling daring,

To find boys to go home with.

No, not like that.

I was caught kissing girls in faraway hidden bedrooms, in locked bathrooms,

My heart rippling with fear

And words about how beautiful she is boiling out of me,

Terrified but hoping that she’ll see something in me,

That I won’t just be a story to tell her friends about on Monday.

 I’ve been burned by that flame half a dozen times,

And learned soon on that when pieces of paper

With the word “dyke” on them found their way into my locker,

Having a boy on my arm afforded me some plausible deniability.

I understand why you don’t want to believe me.

[orionsdogs]

How to Love Something Ruined

Like this like this:

Like your hands are a spring breeze

Like your lips are sunlight

Like your voice is distant surf

Like your body is the warmth that old coals give off,

 Like love is a speck of dust landing on a bookshelf

Like desire is a tub of warm water

Like happiness is the moonlight that washes over my bed each night

Without me ever having to ask it to.

Like this like this like this:

So tenderly that I forget what hurt is.

[donna-marieriley-deactivated202]

I am a woman who needs time to herself. Time to palm the sore spots in me. Time to shoulder-sway in the kitchen, flour on my apron, under my fingernails. In the oven, the cake browns darkest where the lemon zest has collected. The same is true of me - where the bitterness is, that’s where the bruises form. Deepen like the bleed of a stain. I am a woman for whom the novelty of kissing wears off. Desire, fed once, doesn’t beg again. The radio gone tinny now. Storm outside hollering. The lights flicker. I am a woman who sits at the table alone, coffee so hot it blisters the tongue, waiting for something to jar me out of a daydream. The telephone. A revving car. Whirr caught perpetually in a pigeon’s throat. I am a woman who never writes you back. Slips your letter inside my pillowcase and accidentally runs it through the wash a week later. I cut horoscopes out of the newspapers and mod-podge them onto a lampshade. I might be lonely. To begin with, I should say things with more authority: I am lonely. Always the flies around the fruit basket. Banana skins gone rancid. Everything has an expiry date. Desire, once opened, must be consumed within so many days. None of this paints a clearer picture. What then? The sound a zipper makes when it’s undone. Delirious. My body a sunbeam. I wade through my own longing and come out the other side dry. Desire, fed once, never returns with the same appetite.