My Life in Verse

Full-time teacher, sometimes aspiring poet and all-round lover of the English language

[adirabennett]

[adirabennett]

[existential-celestial]

Franz Wright, from “East Boston, 1996,” in God’s Silence

[schuylerpeck]

I want time to be quiet. I want a week where there’s nothing expected of me. I want some light snowfall. I want a home I can rearrange the furniture with every season. To bring friends over to be warmed by the fireplace. I want to paint the walls. I want to curl into you until I feel my hurt fall asleep. I want to pluck rosemary from the windowsill. I want to feel comfort again. I want so much space in my heart for the light to fill.

[beggars-opera]

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

[formerlyanon]

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

[lifeinpoetry]

“Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don’t let it go.”

— — Doris Lessing, from her Nobel lecture “On not winning the Nobel Prize” 

[tristealven]

“Love is so embarrassing. I bled in your bed. I’m sorry. I have built you a shore with all my best words & still, the waves.”

— Claire Schwartz, from Bound

[apoemaday]

Getting the Laundry

by Warren Woessner

Rest has come again. The cars push their echoes, reading the road like braille. The tired squeek of a single tricycle rolls home. I look up to see a half-moon not quite included by the Power Co-op/Truck Service signs. It has time yet to land safely in the dark. The last patch of dirt in front of the new GTC has hardened into asphalt. Again, there is time. I find myself folding the laundry more slowly than I could. It is a simple thing to do. A thing missed, like picking fruit or sanding wood. Also the warmth. Clothes have the patience of old friends: with open doors, always on my side.

[tristealven]

“(…) no one wants a half-remembered tragedy. You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.”

— Life of the Party, ‘Addendum II to No Baptism’ by Olivia Gatwood (via decreation)

[muuhareb]

[quotemadness]

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

— Robert Frost

[northstargrassmaiden]

[luthienne]

Nikki Giovanni, from “Adulthood II”

[apocryphics]

“Acknowledgements,” Franny Choi

[bad-days-are-ok]

[mushfae]

[kafk-a]

lucille clifton