that's the way love comes

@verrlorenpoet ☆ poetry reblogs

[stolenhead]

bedbound at the regularly scheduled interval. my blood a hornet swarm. my heart, a sparrow, starving. shimmering mirage my spine hardly touches the mattress. how hard it is to be still, to feel this body aging, this siphoning of stolen hours. you dream with open eyes, a warden rapt by the evidentiary splatter of my sanguine notions. unclean. here i am when your sleep covets the fever of my starsick body how needful, your unconsciousness. not my doe-eyed dark shot through with waltzing geometry. dogs howling in my good ear. my name over and over. over and over, i'm falling through the ceiling, conspiring with an attic full of ghosts.

[literaryvein]

L. V., exhumed writings

[feral-ballad]

Sandra Cisneros, from Loose Woman: Poems; "I Am on My Way to Oklahoma to Bury the Man I Nearly Left My Husband For"

[flowerytale]

Sharon Olds, from "Little Things"; Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002

[flowerytale]

Mahmoud Darwish, from “Mural”, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (tr. by Munir Akash & ‎Carolyn Forché)

[weltenwellen]

Jenny Zhang, from "my sweet angel on earth thank you for this life"

[beguines]

I have wanted this year to pass and, with it, all its sorrow. But I've started to sense spatial as well as temporal dimensions in the four numbers that are its name, and I'm reluctant now to let it go. A container--in the way it holds things a year might be a container, and this year is the last one that holds alive my grandmother, my friend who died in April and my friend who died in October. When you explain what you've lost to someone, even a person you know well,

you need a new language, and I don't have one. It's like falling in love: you need a new language then, but get by, somehow, because of the way passion compresses every moment into memory (the present both what it is and what it will become).

Aleda Shirley, from "The Best Way Out Is Always Through", Long Distance

[tearinmyside]

day 6...

in your haste

a chipped bowl, the ceramic flake resting in a sea of nothingness— metaphors be damned. reddened skin and arms that release from you over and over in a march of hollow. how much can you extract from this car struck bird? starvation becomes survival, becomes a ritual to keep a bed, a facade of contentment. in your haste, a singular taste becomes a tourniquet, a placebo for the wandered heart.

-kab

[literaryvein]

L. V., writings from the waiting room

[seraphinesaintclair]

Delmira Agustini, “The Ineffable”

[pollen]

Mary Oliver, from "Such Singing in the Wild Branches"

[tinydancerinyourhead]

words trickle honey from his mouth

i lie awake anticipating the prose

sticky the letters dripping from his lips

they entice me more than he knows

leave me with an ache and a thirst

i’ll drink line by line where he flows

until the fruit of our bodies are ripe

i’ll take heed where his poetry goes

[bloomingonionbitch]

Excerpt of "East Boston, 1966" from God's Silence - Franz Wright

[literaryvein]

L. V., life after the aftermath

[tearinmyside]

day 5...

who will be hungry for me? (after jenny slate)

as the lines deepen in the corners of my eyes? when i am pouring out pasta water into a stained ceramic sink? are touches supposed to linger after the expiration date of a body? i have never been desirable, not in youth, not in this sunset existence. who will lie next to me as the ceiling fan whirs its sad song? as the endless loop of lofi music rounds the sharp corners of a nearly vacant home? is there hunger left for the emaciated? can this forgotten story be redeemed? i have all of this longing in my pantry. won't someone claim it?

-kab

[havingapoemwithyou]

Superbly Situated by Robert Hershon

[havingapoemwithyou]

The Way It Is by William Stafford