sundays in shorts

welcome the dark welcome the light just don’t give up the fight

[thatdiva]

When your history professor schools you in front of the entire world.

[lifeinpoetry]

This is melancholia. Wanting to eat yourself whole.

Diamond Sharp, from “Mal de Ojo,” published in Joint (via lifeinpoetry)

[wnq-writers]

Find out what sets your soul on fire. And then go and do it.

king-atlas (via wnq-writers)

[citymod]

Visit Original Link

Legendary comedian Chelsea Peretti shares her feelings about silverfish/house centipedes.

[sundaysinshorts]

I can’t even stop laughing ever

[threesixxtyfive]

Day Five Hundred Sixty One.

pressure builds slowly a constant and steady thrum please, help relieve it

[sundaysinshorts]

I like to draw neural things and then see what sections make patterns like optical illusions

[sundaysinshorts]

“becoming”

like a body of water

fluidity a natural component

there is no shoreline

where I end I also begin

before I inundated an area

like taking the space

I was, I am

a particle finding energy in connection

the hydrogen that makes this human matter

bonding, the oxygen where your words

walk in +

then a breath +

then a life

[heatherchristle]

Sometimes, when I am moving from thinking to writing, it feels as if I am pulling a coiled, half-tangled string of pennant flags–the kind you’d find decorating a used car lot–from a small hole at the top of my skull, and am laying the string down, bloody, on butcher paper to dry.

[sundaysinshorts]

what I have for you is love

[sundaysinshorts]

Thank you Heather Christle.

I’ve been talking to the trees or hanging around the trees again and they are in my bedroom now an entire forest! the trees understand, the trees know my handwriting how it comes together like strokes resembling my mother’s the trees can hold so many things like a story I once wrote in it I was a tree too.

[sundaysinshorts]

"the absence of shame"

every direction is a forward progression every filter is authentic the guiltless choices holding respect for agency fearless for being seen

[sundaysinshorts]

first drafts

emptiness is an alluring impossibility it’s like finding a place in the city where you also have acres of land for open spaces give me proof so solid it solo stands so going, going, going bones scanned takes the shoes of three separate paces said maybe my mind is shutting down separate shoes of countless paces but those sorts of scanners are as much a figment as these feelings at the airport, they have scanners for hate maybe this sort of life is just my fate here, we’ll scan my neck just to check.

[sundaysinshorts]

poem freewriting

when every second multiplies into pounds units are no longer universal and logic is the inverse may we take a moment to merely reflect on the damage done by others can fullness–really–assuage repulsion and disdain or are they one in the same?

the need for understanding

[lifeinpoetry]

Look at me. I am woven together by story, held firm by myth. Look at me. I will tell you of the men that ate me bloody. I will tell you of how ferociously I bit my way out of their stomachs.

Venetta Octavia, from “Vitriol,” The Alchemy of Smallness (via lifeinpoetry)

Loving this tonight

[heatherchristle]

-Zbignew Herbert, translated from the Polish by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter

I post this because it gives me strength in my fear, because it “sings about the dark times,” and does not turn away.

[sundaysinshorts]

holding onto The Strength

[sundaysinshorts]

here.

i left you where they show us how to cry. i even ate my lunch on top of you. it is also where they help us with things like tying our shoes in the middle of the daytime.

[heatherchristle]

“I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

This was the last round of photographs before the magazine went to press and we returned to Tulsa or Biloxi or Teaneck or Coos Bay or wherever we’d come from, and we were supposed to be photographed with props to show what we wanted to be.

Betsy held an ear of corn to show she wanted to be a farmer’s wife, and Hilda held the bald, faceless head of a hatmaker’s dummy to show she wanted to design hats, and Doreen held a gold-embroidered sari to show she wanted to be a social worker in India (she didn’t really, she told me, she only wanted to get her hands on a sari).

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.

‘Oh, sure you know,’ the photographer said.

'She wants,’ said Jay Cee wittily, 'to be everything.’

I said I wanted to be a poet.

Then they scouted about for something for me to hold.

Jay Cee suggested a book of poems, but the photographer said no, that was too obvious. It should be something that showed what inspired the poems. Finally Jay Cee undipped the single, long-stemmed paper rose from her latest hat.

The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. 'Show how happy it makes you to write a poem.’

I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee’s window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey cloud puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

I felt it was very important to keep the line of my mouth level.

'Give us a smile.’

At last, obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up.

'Hey,’ the photographer protested, with sudden foreboding, 'you look like you’re going to cry.’”

-Sylvia Plath, THE BELL JAR

[sundaysinshorts]

finding Sylvia again

[sundaysinshorts]

glitter

jars in places where their insides glisten. shimmers settle and emotions erupt, these jars get shaken up and in their shaking they reveal their truth: actually being a cup.