A blog for those who want to improve their craft.

Curated by drugz and poemsbydes.

[thequotejournals]

I want to inform them that I am not silent because I have nothing to say. I am silent because nobody is listening.

Kelsey Sutton, The Lonely Ones (via wordsnquotes)

[latenightcornerstore]

This is your body. It’s a road nobody wants to drive down. It’s a door frame too crooked to hold its own door.

LONESOME IN LARAMIE WYOMING, by Ashe Vernon  (via latenightcornerstore)

[thequotejournals]

You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.

Valente, Catherynne M.. Deathless. (via wordsnquotes)

[poemsbydes]

Y’ALL THIS POEM IS THE FUCKING BEST. Do you love menstruation? Do you hate menstruation? PRAISE THE PERIOD. WATCH THIS POEM. SHARE THIS POEM.

[poemsbydes]

Dear Straight Black Folks, From a place of love and concern I must say we have got to be better in regards to the way we treat our queer brothers and sisters. Our language and actions are literally breaking the hearts of many of our family & friends who identify as LGBTQ. They don’t need our pardon or our “forgiveness”. They don’t need us cherry picking scriptures or fear-inducing language disguised as empowerment rhetoric. They need our love. They need us to not emulate found hatred. No, we don’t have a lock on the homophobia market. Yes, we are as we often do, emulating oppressive behavior in the name of feeling some sense of moral superiority. No, we don’t have to choose between liberation & equality issues when we are all bleeding. We cannot proclaim that ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ to us, while dehumanizing the lives of our people who we say love differently, as if love has a guest list for who it allows in. Also, if we say Black Lives Matter check the origin from where this phrase came. Three queer Black women. I’m guessing they were looking for a sentiment to be inclusive of our all our experiences, and the dope thing about inclusion is that no one gets left out.

Donney Rose; poet, teacher, badass activist. (via poemsbydes)

[latenightcornerstore]

There are poets who sing you to sleep and poets who ready you for war and I want to be both.

Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

[arsafipoetica]

“They didn’t hijack the planes. They hijacked my religion.”

Amir Safi

[wanpoetry]

😍

[poemsbydes]

Hey, y’all! Here’s a brand stinkin’ new poem from me. It’s the first poem I’ve ever written about zombies and body hair. Joy! Thanks, Write About Now ( wanpoetry) for making such a kickass video! So glad y’all caught this!

[unfriendlyindianhottie-deactiva]

1. When you’re 13, and your mother still stumbles over her words, r’s sitting on heavy tongues, unsure of the vowels in her mouth, do not get mad. Do not get embarrassed. Think of rivers she has bathed in, the smell of sandal paste lingering around her. She is your home. 2. Don’t ever let someone call you exotic. You’re a warrior, angry and brash and beautiful. You are the daughter of Karachi and the grandchild of Delhi. Your blood holds the rivers of Sri Lanka. YOU. ARE. NOT. EXOTIC. 3. When you get told to go back to your country at 18, in a bar filled with rowdy boys who want to know what it’s like to taste foreign pussy, and you refuse, start screaming. Start yelling and don’t stop till you get kicked out. They want to know how you taste, well, they better know how to swallow a burning flame. 4. There will be days you hate yourself, where you will want to rip off your skin, burn the ashes, praying that tomorrow you will be lighter, your bones less weary, and you will look less foreign, less like a target, less, less, less.The tears wont stop. these days are the worst. 5. You are beautiful. From the shadows of the Ganges on your cheekbones to the arches of your feet, you are beautiful. Stop looking at that box of Fair and Lovely. You don’t need it. Throw it out. 6. When relatives start dropping hints about marriage, pretend you have a call waiting and instead go play fruit ninja in an isolated room for 4 hours. 7. Learn to strike back when people start making fun of your country, when they talk about terrorism, talk about outsourcing, talk about existing. Don’t let them erase your identity. Don’t let them take even that away from you. 8. YOU. ARE. BEAUTIFUL. 9. the sun is shining and she’s been wanting to kiss you for so long. don’t keep her waiting.

unfriendlyindianhottie: things I have learnt about being a desi girl  (via peggingwithstyles)

[maelinoe-deactivated20170821]

I have been warned there is no true love without crucifixion.  I spread my arms wider.

Excerpts from my diary // Camillea (via maelinoe)

[clementinevonradics]

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” -Zora Neale Hurston Zora, These days, if you were to let them see your pain they’d destroy you and say you deserved it. I’ve seen the rest of the world. They’re jackals. Everyone has more teeth than you and less blood. They want a smiling dinner, want the meat of you. They do not care about your grief. That’s for you to swallow. You have not been to this world lately. We keep rebirthing ourselves into the same old thing, broken and ugly. This summer, in the steam of Missouri, a man who looked like my brother killed a child and people are laughing. On the news, a woman like my sister clawed at his body, sifting the bullets for guilt. She blamed his blood for staining her hands. Mackenzie died that same August on the hottest day of the year. I found her body in the hallway, medicine was clutched in her hand like a rosary. We could smell her around the house for days and could not breathe for the grief. But no one laughed. No one snuck into our house and stole our sorrow for target practice, no one looked at our family, barely surviving the loss of her, and tried to tell us she never deserved our love in the first place. Which is to say there are things we share, Zora, and things we do not. We have both known grief and anger. We have both held the body of a woman we loved when that woman was no longer inside that body. You fought for that boy in Missouri, spoke loud even when they came for you with their teeth and their dinner plates. The first is a kind of mourning I understand, but the rest I don’t. I can’t. I never will. I don’t know how to speak to that, So I won’t speak anymore. But here are my hands. I see the blood.

More Teeth and Less Blood,Clementine von Radics (via clementinevonradics)

[wordscanbeenough]

Some afternoons, I wander through your photographs. Letters. Wonder if the river won your war.

Jeanann Verlee, Finally I Allow Him The Pen (via wordscanbeenough)

Originally published at Anti- and appears in Verlee’s new book, Said the Manic to the Muse, (Write Bloody Publishing, April 2015)

[fables-of-the-reconstruction-de]

The world is full of abandoned meanings.

Don DeLillo, White Noise (via fables-of-the-reconstruction)

[spokenwordacademy]

It isn’t madness but shame for wanting and shame for not having what I want, which is a kind of madness—drunk, 3 a.m., the stairwell too steep to climb. The bed can wait. I go to the pool instead, strip and step in, the smell of smoke and sweat washing from hair and skin. The wet kiss: his mouth pressed here, my neck, and there, my chest—in the end—went nowhere. Cars pass with coupled strangers. I wade. The brick wall stretches into the sky, the sky empty, save the constellations, whose lives I love—yours most of all, father of poets, whose lyre filled trees and stones with awe, the lover torn to shreds and thrown in to the river. Tonight, you’re the swan, lost among pinholes of light, your throat bitten by a black hole that takes and takes and never fills. I kick, stroke my tired arms to buoy this body. It makes ring after perfect ring, but each one breaks along the edge. You who never were, did you look down on the world at last and see that more won’t be enough? Not now. Not ever. Want picks the human heart. You’re the lie I won’t believe forever.

Blas Falconer, To Orpheus 

[wordsnquotes]

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Terry Pratchett (via wordsnquotes)

[drugz]

I’ve seen your kind of false glitter shimmy through loopholes in this life, seen even the knocking on our hearts submitted to scientific study. But the heart is not really the part to worry about.

Natalie Giarratano, from Janis Joplin to an Apparition of the Virgin Mary (via drugz)

[aseaofquotes]

[aseaofquotes]

Aimee Bender, “On a Saturday Afternoon”