Passionate and Fragmentary

iris’ poetry and literature archive

[anotheryellowfog]

Charles Simic, ‘Totemism’, from Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

“a memory is a story told so well, it becomes part of the body.”

— Life of the Party, ‘What I Know About Healing’ by Olivia Gatwood

[mythofdevotion]

“In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away. In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish. Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess.”

— Sabrina Orah Mark, “Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over.” in The Paris Review

[stabbingstabbed]

they can’t kill us until they kill us - hanif abdurraqib

[jacisdeadlonglivejac-deactivate]

Siri Hustvedt Notes on Seeing

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

“Oh, those razor-sharp appetites (…)”

— Milk and Filth, ‘(Wizardine)’ by Carmen Giménez Smith

[voirlvmer]

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan, from “The Bridge Between the Falls”, The Sea That Beckoned

[kaotic-youth]

“Eating alone was shameful because it couldn’t be disguised by anything else. I didn’t have company, so the attention couldn’t be diverted from me. If I was eating alone, it was the result of two mortifying facts: because I had nobody to eat with, and because I was hungry. I couldn’t pretend I was eating for the social experience, or because I was keeping somebody else company. I had to claim the desire as my own. It was my appetite—raw, exposed—and nothing else, and soon appetite itself began to carry the shame.”

— THERE’S NOTHING SCARIER THAN A HUNGRY WOMAN by Laura Maw

[luthienne]

“I want to believe, walking those aimless nights, that I was praying. For what I’m still not sure. But I always felt it was just ahead of me. That if I walked far enough, long enough, I would find it—perhaps even hold it up, like a tongue at the end of its word.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[muscone]

ocean vuong on writing metaphors

[notmanthelessbutnaturemore]

[thepoetryachiieves]

Carol Ann Duffy

[thepoetryachiieves]

“Sometimes it’s as if I’m composed of nothing but symptoms of illness, I am a phantom built out of pain.”

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokatczuk

[thepoetryachiieves]

Sula, Toni Morrison

[thepoetryachiieves]

Moshi Moshi, Banana Yoshimoto

[goreprofonde]

“Take the bird alive and blind it. Keep it in a room where there are no windows,

or if there are windows board them up. It’s important that no light gets in

and that the bunting cannot see its body. Feed this creature of god figs, millet,

grapes so it gorges and engorges, unrecognizable to itself.

Drown the Ortolan in Armagnac, snuff out the light in a snifter, so that its belly

and lungs fill with the liqueur of the hereafter. When you put this songbird between your lips

and bite down, veil your face with my mother’s silk sari.

Hide your gluttony from the god with hungry dog eyes envying our nocturnal commotion.

Taste the burst of liqueur-flowers from the lungs on your tongue.

Taste the entire life in the dark, every man who has ever put me in his mouth.”

- Rajiv Mohabir, Ortolan.

[virgin-martyr]

Anne Carson, excerpt from Antigonick by Sophocles