On Being Empty

Kate. Twenty-one. Kinda sad. Really tired. "She was a compulsive pessimist. Always looking for the soft brown spot in fruit, pressing so hard she created it."

[buttonpoetry]

I am not crazy, this is just Thursday.

Jeanann Verlee - “Hereditary” (via buttonpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

And how could I not, bathed in the light of her wound, find my calling there?

Natasha Trethewey, from “Articulation,” published in The Atlantic (via lifeinpoetry)

[syrupbrat]

[lifeinpoetry]

My rape found me on my hypothetical blanket, poured gasoline on me, and lit a cigarette. At first, I thought I was okay. I went to class, continued going out to the club with friends, and I fucked. Fucking was my one reprieve from my thoughts, which at that point had succumbed slowly to the fire. They had picked a room in the house, painted it blue, locked the door, lit a few candles in a room, already becoming ash. Fucking allowed me to be silent, to be voided, to not exist.

Erin McDonald, from “The Smallest Harm,” A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (via lifeinpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

the loneliness spills out of the box,               here onto my lap and up into all of it. a salty quiet         rushing in,    and of it, all of me.

— Lisa Marie Basile, from “Twelve Poems,” Sporklet

[mournfulroses]

and the avalanche of aching where do you put that?

[mournfulroses]

and the avalanche of aching where do you put that?

[nextbestcoast]

we go north on wahsatch and then east on kiowa, your car shuddering every time we turn left. I’ve spent a year driving through this city with you and I can always predict the route you take to anywhere we go, the same way I can predict the way the light falls on the pink auto shop at 6:04 in the evening during late summer. I’ve never trusted august and this year is no exception. we’re at the bar now and everyone is talking with their hands, smoking in the cool haze of the setting sun and this is so good it hurts. how do you hold onto this? how do you let go when it’s time? how do you stop being afraid that everyone will leave?

[lifeinpoetry]

The feeling I have, the flutter in my chest—this has nothing to do with being suicidal. I don’t want to die. I don’t even want to close my eyes. It’s more like this world is not enough for me.

Juliet Escoria, from “Mental Illness On a Weekday,” Black Cloud (via lifeinpoetry)

[brennatwohy]

Swallowtail, by Brenna Twohy

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“[H]e was more lonely than the contentment of this family love could help; that it even increased his loneliness, or made it hard for him not to be lonely. He felt that sitting out here, he was not lonely; or if he was, that he felt on good terms with the loneliness; that he was a homesick man, and that here on the rock, though he might be more homesick that ever, he was well. He knew that a very important part of his well-being came of staying a few minutes away from home, very quietly, in the dark, listening to the leaves if they moved, and looking at the stars; and that his […] own presence, was indispensable to this well-being.”

James Agee, from A Death in the Family (Penguin, 2009)

[godswollen-deactivated20171014]

[narnia]

[thegoodvybe]

Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.

NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS, Report to Greco   (via freakscircus)

[lifeinpoetry]

what if this burning turns me into a house unable to sing since the most a house can do is groan?

Amber Atiya, from “The Skin South of My Collar Bone Burns,” West Branch Wired’s Ache of a Prism In Us (via lifeinpoetry)

[thegoodvybe]

Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.

NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS, Report to Greco   (via freakscircus)

[antigonick]

I uttered my prayer : Give me your honey bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song.

Carol Ann Duffy, excerpt of The Rare Bee (via calines)