[intimatum]

David Mitchell, Slade House

[ssanguinea]

Rose are the roses in the hands of the insatiable, she the color of hell.

– Alejandra Pizarnik, Selected Poems, tr. Cecilia Rossi

[ssanguinea]

They pulled me from the rubble

like a fabled sword; never

was Excalibur so tarnished, never

did dustier hands reach

for so shattered a hilt.

— Amal El-Mohtar, “Blackberry Honey” from The Honey Month

[ssanguinea]

...for fear of a knife's edge on her skin, for fear of a longing so keen it would slice her heart in two.

Amal El-Mohtar, “Raw Manuka Honey” from The Honey Month

[lifeinpoetry]

“I have been missing your voice / like bleached bones dream of flesh.”

— Rebecca Salazar, from “Reasonable ground,” published in Cosmonauts Avenue

[ssanguinea]

It is hard not to have faith in this: from the blue-brown clay of night these two potters crushed and smoothed you into being—grind, then curve—built your form up— atlas of bone, fields of muscle, one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale, both Morning and Evening. O, the beautiful making they do— of trigger and carve, suffering and stars— Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters of your small church? Have they not burned on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor, to nectareous feast?

These Hands, If Not Gods by Natalie Diaz

[bostonpoetryslam]

How does every person not cry out all the time? Yes, it was good to eat doughnuts. Yes. I was blessed by many days of joy. A rabbit in the driveway. A rosemary bush with a sorcerer’s cloak of spider webs.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “Homecoming Cistern Alien Vessel,” via the Academy of American Poets (via bostonpoetryslam)

[lifeinpoetry]

Look now: my heart is a fist of barbed wire.

Analicia Sotelo, from “South Texas Persephone,” Virgin (via lifeinpoetry)

[facinaoris]

Madwoman, Shara McCallum

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Hands can remember too.

Christa Wolf, tr. by John Cullen, from “Medea,” originally published c. 1996 (via violentwavesofemotion)

[weltenwellen]

Anne Sexton, from “Eighteen Days Without You”, The Complete Poems

[amargedom]

“I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisted (via goodreadss)

[eastofthesunwestofthemoon]

““Forests have secrets,” he said gently. “It’s practially what they’re for. To hide things. To separate one world from another.””

— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless (via bulgakeov)

[weltenwellen]

“(…) one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns.”

— Tracy K. Smith, from “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?”, Life on Mars

[195195119511951-deactivated2021]

“Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Agree With You,” Hannah Gamble

[januaryhoney]

i had a dream about you, richard siken

[wellconstructedsentences]

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver (via wellconstructedsentences)