[exitwound]

to mend and be mended and mend and be mended and mend and be mended and

[transangelicism]

regarding the röttgen pietà, elle emerson

[allthingsandreagibson]

“We all have bullets beneath our skin we pray our lovers won’t flinch at when they find.”

— Andrea Gibson, from “Piano” in The Madness Vase

[firstfullmoon]

“[That] there were sunsets every day, that we weren’t meant to be coffined and buried whilst all the time still living, that nothing of the dark was so enormous that never could we surmount it, that always there were new chapters, that we must let go the old, open ourselves to symbolism, to the most unexpected of interpretations, that we must too, uncover what we’ve kept hidden, what we think we might have lost.”

— Anna Burns, from Milkman

[puthy]

I just wanna lay down and like have a tree grow through me

[egotisticalgold]

“Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?”

- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgous

[swi-t]

Men love to talk about how much it sucks to be put in the friendzone but can we talk about how it feels to be a woman and realize that you didn’t have an actual friend? You just had somebody looming over you, waiting for you to agree to fuck them

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine

[litverve]

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

–Helen Macdonald, from H is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape, 2014)

[rabbit-light]

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Ada Limón

[apoemaday]

Tree

by Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house.

Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose.

That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

[moggiepillar]

When I was about 11, my father was listening to NPR in the car and I was the captive audience in the back seat with no choice but to listen. It was some gardening and/or food themed show and the host was talking about how carrots grown in the winter produce more sugar. This is an evolutionary tactic on the carrot’s part to survive harsh conditions. And that was when this man dropped the most banger line I’ve ever heard. “When you bite into a carrot and it tastes sweet, that’s the carrot saying ‘I don’t want to die.’” I was floored, changed as a person forever. This line haunts me. The poetry. The emotion. NPR made me the sappy garden idiot I am today, romanticizing senescence and over analyzing the science behind vegetables.

[notyourbirthdayanymore]

“If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion.”

— Twyla Tharp

[likewildhorses]

untitled

[roadmotel]

“[…] I stand up before my family, and in its circle I ceaselessly brandish knives to hurt it but at the same time to protect it.”

— Franz Kafka, from a draft of a letter to Felice Bauer dated October 18, 1916.

[fawnaura]

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more…”

— Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

[weltenwellen]

Ada Limón, from “The Great Blue Heron Of Dunbar Road”, Bright Dead Things