spring is the mischief in me

julian / poetry / main: @ephhemeralite

[telemachus-detachment]

"Telemachus' Detachment" by Louise Glück

Also found here. Text:

When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also insane. Also very funny.

this poem exists in the beautiful space where poem and tumblr post overlap. gluck was a fantastic poet but she also would have made a killing on here

[shabbytigers]

[havingapoemwithyou]

buying stock by Denise Duhamel

[top-cheese]

i wake up. i make coffee. i look for a poem to break my heart. i spend all day like this.

[top-cheese]

first poem. carl phillips. off to a great start.

[apoemaday]

Looking Back

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Remember me before I was a heap of salt, The laughing child who seldom did as she was told or came when she was called, The merry girl who became Lot’s bride, The happy woman who loved her wicked city. Do not remember me with pity. I saw you plodding on ahead into the desert of your pitiless faith. Those springs are dry; that earth is dead. I looked back, not forward, into death. Forgiving rains dissolve me, and I come still disobedient, still happy, home.

[skytouches]

“Finally, Some Concrete Career Advice” by Natalie Shapero, published by The Rumpus

[brutalistarchitecture2]

[typewriter-worries]

[ Text ID:

Rehearsal Notes

By Len Verwey

Sorry, I assumed you were awake anyway.

Let’s try it without the heavy breathing

toward the end of the scene in the garden.

It distracts, somehow. Just speak the words, there

and elsewhere, as loudly

or as quietly as they need to be spoken.

Need in this context is vague, but do your best.

Don’t get me wrong, subtlety is not the goal,

not on our budget, but an untested intensity

will flounder somewhere between the prompter

and the first row of the audience.

They know the story too, after all,

and it will be late by the time you face them.

Don’t gaze into the distance when the

future is referred to. Don’t hope

when you speak of hope.

Presumably it’s not easy being us

but consider the alternatives.

Have you looked around recently?

In scene four you are passing an empty bowl around

that must seem heavy, but overdo

the heaviness and its emptiness is the final

lingering effect. Do you see what I mean?

I mean use the sharp knives carefully.

I mean real tears

don’t mean you’re acting well, just that you’ve lost

yourself in yourself again,

and where the script says scream

a step to the side and possibly a finger

touched to the mouth will do. ]

[tinyghosthands]

Wendy Xu

[apoemaday]

Jessica gives me a chill pill

by Angie Sijun Lou

I keep waking up in different beds and in this same body. I have to say this right away so you know it didn't start with limbs slackened, hair oily, a cruelty towards the sun. It started in the backseat of Jessica's Pepto-dismal truck. She tied my hair back with rubber bands when the freeway passed clean through us. Jessica says I can feel like a cherry blossom tree wobbling under lightning. Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else. That night we lose the 7/11 lottery but I draw my lucky number, no quarters so we scratch our tickets with fingernails. Jessica says that's the sanctity of ritual — a ceaselessness in how I look at every drop of rain before it touches ground, the way Jessica mouths my name in her sleep eating each syllable like a minor god. I'm coming out as someone who loves things unevenly, my theologies strewn out in the dark, this iPhone an almost oracle. Jessica forces me to watch every sunset even when I am full. She puts her fingers in my mouth and says open your eyes. Open them. You see the small-town girls on big billboards? One day that's us.

[tamvmat]

Only one is not a mimic.

Faberge Eggs. They're neat

[havingapoemwithyou]

SS suppression by Caroline Bird

[havingapoemwithyou]

Blessing the Baby by Diannely Antigua

[apoemaday]

Kids Who Die

by Langston Hughes

This is for the kids who die, Black and white, For kids will die certainly. The old and rich will live on awhile, As always, Eating blood and gold, Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi Organizing sharecroppers Kids will die in the streets of Chicago Organizing workers Kids will die in the orange groves of California Telling others to get together Whites and Filipinos, Negroes and Mexicans, All kinds of kids will die Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned Who pen editorials in the papers, And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names White and black, Who make surveys and write books Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die, And the sleazy courts, And the bribe-reaching police, And the blood-loving generals, And the money-loving preachers Will all raise their hands against the kids who die, Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets To frighten the people — For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people — And the old and rich don’t want the people To taste the iron of the kids who die, Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power, To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die — Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you Except in our hearts Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field, Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht But the day will come — You are sure yourselves that it is coming — When the marching feet of the masses Will raise for you a living monument of love, And joy, and laughter, And black hands and white hands clasped as one, And a song that reaches the sky — The song of the life triumphant Through the kids who die.

[apoemaday]

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

[lunchboxpoems]

JAMES A. PEARSON

[engulfes]

Magdalene - Marie Howe

[Transcript under the cut]

Keep reading

[wildgeeseinthewest]

[kitchen-light]

Leila Chatti, published at The Yale Review, December 6, 2023