[mossyshadows]

this and good bones by maggie smith being in the same issue... yeah the parallels <3

[textid]

Text ID: Poem with a Line from Bluets Maggie Smith

I could bury my face in it, the sad sack of a town with hair that smells like an animal, bury my face in its dark fur, wrap my arms around its barrel ribcage and hold on for dear life. It’s wild but it might let me near it, sad sack of a town, half acre with tall grass I could bury my face in. I could lie and listen to it snuffling beside me. For what should I save my longing? Forget the afterlife, the aftertown: there is no knowing what happens beyond this sad animal, this sack of hair. Forget the golden future beyond future. I want to see all of it here, all of it through these eyes, in this animal body, while I am still discernably myself, while my shadow falls on this sad sack of a town, this dear life.

[havingapoemwithyou]

Wound by Larry Levis

[textid]

Text ID: I've loved you like a man loves an old wound picked up in a razor fight

on a street nobody remembers. Look at him: even in the dark he touches it gently.

[lunchboxpoems]

BOB HICOK

[textid]

text ID: THE EULOGY I DIDN'T GIVE (XXIV)

My younger brother was afraid of thunder, lightning. My father bought a recording of storms, put it on the stereo, and rocked on the love seat with my brother over and over, until the sound meant comfort, warmth. Much later, my brother became obsessed with meteorology and dreamed of becoming a weatherman. When I finally connected the early fear with the later passion, we were looking down at my father in his coffin. Not my father but his body. More like an echo of his flesh. No weather on his face. I’d seen him often in a suit but never wearing a vest. Pajamas would have made more sense. The soft rain of the talking all around us was a cocoon I wanted to live inside. I heard the metronome of my heart and thought of Quakers waiting for silence to open its mouth. Of the hope just below the surface of the phrase, keeping time. - Bob Hicok

[havingapoemwithyou]

father roger goes for a walk by Franz Wright

[textid]

text ID: It's September 13th again, and the sun is shining.

This leafy largely vacant rectory is just a place for me to hang my head. It's the last day of somebody's childhood. And every day I'll try to do one thing I like, in memory of being happy.

[girlfictions]

Matthew Olzmann

[textid]

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

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.

[firstfullmoon]

hanif abdurraqib via his instagram stories

[textid]

text ID: will answer, let’s say between 3 and 9, across a range of topics. What’s your favourite thing about being in love? well, for me, at my luckiest, love has been a transformation of architecture(s,) both internal and external. Which, for me, means that I most delight in the way sounds and shapes and colors of the world that I’ve always understood in a single way all begin to bend towards a new understanding, informed by or propelled by loving another person. When we say “this song now reminds me of ___” for example, what actually is being said is “you have moved into the world of this song, I have welcomed it, and it is a different song now.” And internally, I think being loved well provides opportunity for a sort of internal renovation. The city of yourself, built/arranged/maintained by you and for you still gets to be yours, but the very act of someone being curious about its roads & buildings & whatnot might make you wonder about the possibilities within it that you didn’t see before.

I think platonic love, romantic love, familial love, all of it is very lucky because it is actually not promised, to any of us. And there’s a whole lotta fucking people in the world, and the vast, vast majority of them will not only never love you, but also not know you exist. The better money is on the loneliness. And so, knowing this, opening oneself up to the possibility of that work of seeking, knowing that heartbreak is a possible outcome, is brave. And knowing THAT, a person finding another person who understands them in a full, wholly unique way feels miraculous to me, given the odds. So I guess the short answer is that my favorite thing is being in the midst of a miracle which acts against what the odds say.

[kafk-a]

Lisel Mueller, ‘There are Mornings,’ from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

[textid]

Text ID: Even now, when the plot

calls for me to turn to stone,

the sun intervenes. Some mornings

in summer, I step outside

and the sky opens

and pours itself into me

as if I were a saint

about to die. But the plot

calls for me to live, be ordinary,

say nothing to anyone.

Inside the house,

the mirrors burn when I pass.

[godsopenwound]

Ollie Schminkey from Dead Dad Jokes

[textid]

Text ID:

if death is a fish, i have no choice but to be the

newspaper,

to soak its blood while my father guts it

[roadmotel]

Jon Ware, I Am In Eskew

[textid]

Text ID: Here’s my question. If the ghost wants nothing more than to be witnessed, why would it appear behind you, not in front of you? The only answer I can think of is this: it appears behind you because it already knows, to an absolute certainty, that you will have no choice but to look back.

[kallunavulgaris]

[textid]

Screenshot of a tweet from Fredward, Fredward (@Fredward3948576): I’m so glad that I have a public diary that showcases my cognitive decline

[unsubconscious]

‘Do not ask your children to strive’ by William Martin

[textid]

Text ID:

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

[annori]

Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)

[textid]

Text ID: “Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

[luthienne]

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[textid]

Text ID: Can anyone deny that we are haunted? What is it that crouches under the myths we have made? Always the physical presence of something split off.

[kafk-a]

Yusef Komunyakaa

[textid]

Text ID

Rock Me, Mercy

The river stones are listening because we have something to say. The trees lean closer today. The singing in the electrical woods has gone dumb. It looks like rain because it is too warm to snow. Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding, we know you can't be everywhere at once. Have you corralled all the pretty wild horses? The memory of ants asleep in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur. The magpies gaze at us, still waiting. River stones are listening. But all we can say now is, Mercy, please, rock me.

[lunchboxpoems]

EMILY KENDAL FREY

[textid]

Text ID

This Deepening Takes Place Again

Emily Kendal Frey

What if everything were revealed: where I was last night. You, etc. The rain is coming down like salad. My sister's hair reminds me of my sister so much I can't stop looking. Who am I to have arms? On the plane one short dream: a baby so small it wasn't even human, just a bouquet of light with wise cellular eyes. If losing me is the worst thing to happen, your life is still a good life.

[derangedrhythms]

Margaret Atwood, True Stories; from ‘Variation On the Word Sleep’

[textid]

[text ID: I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

end ID.]

[weltenwellen]

Rita Dove, from “November for Beginners“

[textid]

[text ID: We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving. We ache in secret,

end ID.]