in a dream you saw a way to survive

laetitia-k.com

[ryebreadgf]

[kafk-a]

Peter Pereira, ‘A Pot of Red Lentils’ from Saying the World

[lifeinpoetry]

I learn / naming is how one becomes a self. / I know calling makes one return.

— Akosua Afiriyie-Hwedie, from “Call me by my name,” Born in a Second Language (via lifeinpoetry)

[firstfullmoon]

“Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labor is to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart. Physical pain can usually be lessened or stopped only by action. All other human pain, however, is caused by one form or another of separation. And here the act of assuagement is less direct. Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (via soracities)

[megairea]

Mahmoud Darwish, from Low Sky; The Butterfly’s Burden: Selected Poems (tr. by Fady Joudah)    

[syringavulgaris]

Greg Kuzma, For My Wife

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now.”

— Tennessee Williams, from a letter to Donald Windham wr. c. July 1943

[metamorphesque]

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

[fawnaura]

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegies; The Ninth Elegy, tr. A. Poulin, Jr.

[sawasawako-archived]

[firstfullmoon]

& it’s june until morning you’re young until a pop song plays in a dead kid’s room water spilling in from every corner of summer & you want to tell him it’s okay that the night is also a grave we climb out of

— Ocean Vuong, from “Because It’s Summer,” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds

[poetsandwriters]

Joy Harjo in the September/October 2021 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

[apoemaday]

won’t you celebrate with me

by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

[jazbaaati]

“My God, does love ever die? I ask, and will die asking.”

— Anaïs Nin, from Nearer the Moon: The Previously Unpublished Unexpurgated Diary, 1937-1939 (via luthienne)

[boykeats]

                                               You’re right— Holiness is in the hands even if it’s always the head            that gets haloed.

— C.T. Salazar, “Self Portrait as Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking,” published in Bad Pony Mag

[thegirlthatcriesacademia]

All my grief says the same thing— this isn't how it's supposed to be. And the world laughs, holds my hope by my throat, says: but this is how it is.

Fortesa Latifi, The Truth About Grief

[firstfullmoon]

“Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it. I just don’t want to die anymore.”

— Richard Siken, from Crush (via sagmoonn)