angel teeth

my thoughts are filling up my brain so im letting them pour out with the rain // poetry stuff

[anthropoetics]

kinder than man, athea davis

[kosmogrl]

https://twitter.com/onlyyagirl_

[weltenwellen]

Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”, Glass, Irony, and God

[weltenwellen]

Claudia Rankine, “Some years there exists a wanting to escape…”, Citizen: An American Lyric

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

new poem called "OTZI AWAKE". it's right here so you don't have to subscribe to my substack but i'd love it if you did

[letterful]

— MARIE HOWE.

[dwellsinparadise]

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

[lunchboxpoems]

KAT GIORDANO

[agirlnamedbone]

Duffie Taylor (South, 2019)

[gender-entity]

- Silas Denver Melvin @sweatermuppet, Grit Poetry Collection

[sweatermuppet]

while this is making rounds again, id like to remind everyone you can read grit for free (PDF download) on my ko-fi, order it in paperback, & review it on goodreads

[litbowl]

Poem for Earth Day. From Matthew Olzmann's book, Constellation Route. (Alice James Books, 2022)

[lapsed-bookworm]

[Image Description: A screenshot of a poem on a page from a book.

Title: Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America

Poem: Tell me what it's like to live without | curiosity, without awe. To sail | on clear water, rolling your eyes | at the kelp reefs swaying | beneath you, ignoring the flicker | of mermaid scales in the mist, | looking at the world and feeling | only boredom. To stand | on the precipice of some wild valley, | the eagles circling, a herd of caribou | booming below, and to yawn | with indifference. To discover | something primordial and holy. | To have the smell of the earth | welcome you to everywhere. | To take it all in and then, | to reach for your knife.

The poet's name is at the bottom of the page: Matthew Olzmann.

A location is indicated below the title: Southern Pines, NC.

/End of description.]

[katabasiss]

do you guys think jesus, the son of a carpenter, smelt the wood of the cross & temporarily thought of home

[jovialtorchlight-deactivated202]

Apology

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell you,

but

the door of the home we grew up in

flung open

 and

the junk drawer 

is stuffed full of 

handwritten 

apology

notes.

The hamster 

we buried in the 

backyard

in 2005

 is scurrying across 

the kitchen countertops

fresh sheets,

 still hot from the

dryer 

parachuted 

on the bed.

Sims 2 loaded 

up on the 

white brick

computer

that looming dark

corner of the 

basement where 

I saw a ghost;

the terrible roar of 

the furnace echoing in the dark.

Chalk etchings in the driveway,

portraits of our family,

as we were when we died.

Smiling, neat sweaters, 

capturing the moment

we gave ourselves 

to the flow of

the days

 that do not 

understand 

mercy

or 

what it

means 

to cry

“uncle”.

And I have been battered by the unrelenting force of the days. The terror of the nights. I have given up. 

I have burned this house in my mind. I have razed this memory to the ground. I have tried to end my life twice--

I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you, but

Step out 

into the front yard.

The apology notes from the drawer, floating in the air

coming down

like snow,

 blotting out the sun. 

I caught one. 

I don’t remember writing it,

But it was from me, as I am, in the

loathed present--

addressed to my

ten year old self.

I could see him

watching from the 

living room window,

buck teeth beaming,

 ballcap turned backwards,

holding a Gameboy SP.

The note read:

“I’m sorry for giving 

up on you. 

For giving 

up on living.”

Another note floats down. Not an apology, but a response.

"It's okay.

Want to play

Animal Crossing?

That always

makes

me feel better

when I'm sad.

Or we could

look for frogs

at the grassy edge of the

retention pond.

We still

have

time."

[195195119511951-deactivated2021]

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

[kitchen-light]

“The older I get, the less I see the care of noticing. Maybe this is why I read poems. A poem does not have to happen. It does not have to trend itself toward the extraordinary, to escalate or conflict or inflict or do anything other than pay attention — however the poet chooses, to whatever the poet chooses to pay attention to. To record that attention — to transcribe a litany of detail, and then to walk through the open doors that such detail allows for, by, say, placing the sky inside an open casket — is to make real the dream of poetry, which is the beautiful and generous space of play and care and grief and love and so much else.”

— Devin Kelly, from his essay ‘J. Estanislao Lopez’s “What the Fingers Do” | Thoughts on detail, perfection, and loss.”, published on December 11, 2022

[litbowl]

Poem for Earth Day. From Matthew Olzmann's book, Constellation Route. (Alice James Books, 2022)

[iseethelives]

12.13.22

[feral-ballad]

Nayyirah Waheed, from salt.