[lifeinpoetry]

“THE BODY IS AN unmarked grave before it is given a name.”

— Omotara James, from “Prologue to a Name,” Daughter Tongue

[lifeinpoetry]

How lucky I am to be missed by those who have run out of ways to hold me? & isn’t that what I always wanted? To keep something perfect long enough for everyone to notice when I’m gone.

— Hieu Minh Nguyen, from “Attending the Party,” Not Here

[lifeinpoetry]

to mourn the violences that devastated the soaring holiness / of your body

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, from “Dissociative States,” Beast Meridian

[thecalminside]

“There’s a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded.”

Meister Eckhart

[thelovejournals]

Finally, in a low whisper, he said, ‘I think I might be a terrible person.’ For a split second I believed him - I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.

Miranda July, The First Bad Man

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

Richard Jackson, from section II “You,” of “Identity,” Retrievals (C & R Press, 2014)

[lifeinpoetry]

I will no longer admire the sadness / of others. Nor my own.

Caylin Capra-Thomas, from “As Though I’m Experiencing a Debt,” Inside My Electric City (via lifeinpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

And if I say my body is its own crumbling country, if I say I am always my own home—then what does that make me?

Erika L. Sánchez, from “A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring,” Lessons on Expulsion (via lifeinpoetry)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

but everyone had this patina of slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of I think I knew you when we were children, this look of I’ve loved you ever since you were born and probably longer than that

Paul Hostovsky, from “Everyone was Beautiful,” Dear Truth (Main Street Rag, 2009)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

[buttonpoetry]

I look down at my body and think no, I will not abandon you.

Ashe Vernon - “For Anyone Who’s Listening”

[quotethat]

You will not recognize me. This time, I put my pieces back differently.

Malia Makana, Like Differently Love

[lifeinpoetry]

it is surreal to imagine how i will keep living like this how i probably won’t drink myself to death how my skin will stretch and fold in on itself like time and space and memory and dreams how i would stay alive forever and suffer the fate of the sun and the heat death of the universe just to spite everyone.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, from “The Heat Death of the Universe,” published in West Branch (via lifeinpoetry)

[amortizing]

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (via amortizing)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

You know how we’ve been waiting for the big pain to come? / I think it’s here. I think this is it. / I think it’s been here all along.

Marie Howe, from What The Living Do: Poems; “Pain”

[madgirlf]

all my grief says the same thing:this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. and the world laughs. holds my hope by the throat. says:but this is how it is

Fortesa Latifi (via madgirlf)

[lifeinpoetry]

… find me manic & you can’t find me. I’m a knobless door. I cook meals for the dead & they eat. I ride the casket like a car, step into traffic like a car but I’m a body. No body can look both ways simultaneously. Except me.

Shira Erlichman. from “Ode to Lithium #419: Perfect,” published in The Baffler