word in hand

the poetry of flight

[wordinhand]

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.   What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.   What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky. excerpt from Tony Hoagland’s “A Color of the Sky” 

[moonandtrees]

“I will cut adrift—I will sit on pavements and drink coffee—I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim—this fine October.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. October 1927 featured in “Diaries,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[mymemphisparade]

[wordinhand]

I had a voice that said, I want! I want? I? It should have told me she wants, he wants, they want. And moreover, it's love that makes reality reality. The opposite makes the opposite.

Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow 

[waiataaroha-deactivated20200524]

Jenny Holzer

[wordinhand]

Aubade

Joanna Klink

Who lives where summer ends knows the hard cold of

           autumn is blissfully            close, although it feels            each season newly un-

known. You are constantly newly unknown to me, my night-glowing open-hearted

           sting-of-salt weather.            Rains and winds, sleights-of-            hand. Who if not you

could weigh me enough down. You’d paint my eyes blacker and warmer than they are

           and soon they would carry            whole calendars of            black night in them.

You say you’re pulled back, but it is a rare thing inside those

          shocks of minutes that           holds without our even           needing to touch it.

Maybe you think you trade one clean joy for

           another. But mine is darker,            slanted, nitrous blue at the root,

an acrostic of what is most free and far. To be another

           person than the one            you were before means            more than I understand.

But my gradual hands move in streams over you whether you travel or not,

           as you drop into sleep or not,            and in the book of this            most-alone-place I am

there only when you feel need, a coat so thin and so like

          skin you can touch the           slopes, the smoother

pools, dust-mooded winds over roads, the skeleton instrument of your voice

           as it richens the maps            and paths, summer’s last            shades of white on dark soil,

as if the moon-moth and house-mouth were

           close against the lashes            of your eyes, puzzles-in-            flutter, or wandering

off through the warm night air, unlikely ever again to find such light as this.

Source: Boston Review

[nevver]

Lee Crutchley

[ladyburde]

[wordinhand]

REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE: Jenny Holzer’s Street Posters, 1977-1982

via Huffington Post

[wordinhand]

I do not intend to make only representations of reality… I photograph from my emotions with an intuitive response to the land…. At times I reflect what I see, at times I pay homage to what exists or has been lost….

- Romeo Di Loreto

[shinji--moon-deactivated2017123]

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe, “What The Living Do” (via thoughtsforbees)

[adambirkan]

[wordinhand]

Beyoncé in Third Person

Morgan Parker I type Beyoncé into my phone five out of seven days a week. That’s because I am a woman. I’m a little unpolished behind the scenes. I am lonely and so are all my friends. When one season of The Real Housewives closes, another one opens. New moons disappear unmagically. I am very complicated and so is Beyoncé. Dogs in their gait of privilege circle her. Snow falls for her, shellacks windows for her. Beyoncé, are you sure you’re ok? I slice lemons in my quiet apartment and pile them on a step. When I think about revolution, I turn to the B side of Dangerously in Love. I sequin my breasts like morning shells, teeth sucked as performance. People say things they think are true, like “I love you” and “I feel in a particular way.” I want to be so close and bold. In the news today Beyoncé went to brunch this weekend. Two neighborhoods over, dressed in all black. Comparing salad recipes and third-wheeling weekend dinners dog kibble in my loafers seducing my self in sweatpants is not how I envisioned my 20s or is it. In high school I made a mix tape called “Ladies Is Pimps Too.” That was long before my therapist asked about my masculinity while new buds in Riverside Park slobbered with rain. The only dream I’ve had all year is the one where I am driving out of control. The brakes are shot, the landscape changes, accelerate instead of stop. It’s almost too obvious to interpret, like teeth or pomegranates, or ocean. If you aren’t interested in self- absorption, do not follow me on Twitter. Sometimes I think I should have been left in the incubator longer. Everyone got high levels of entitlement in our veins. We think we are owed. Everything, but especially silence. A secret is during commercials I am living other lives, sauteing green vegetables, imagining Spring breeze carry me through the apartment like a branch, or a painter. There is no humor in touch, the absolute truth. If I breathed on Beyoncé, would she begin to weep? I go to sleep, it’s dark, no one breathes. source: Prelude

[nevver]

What we’re reading

[wordinhand]

øjeRum, Needleshaped Silence III

[wordinhand]

The Sunlight Miguel Murphy You wouldn’t know it could feel so redundant— the wolfish starlings plunder the grass and nothing burns. Big Sur. We came here to rest. The coast, a color. The thought of nothing, the blue middle of my life—                                                    A cliff side and a footpath down to the small beach. And fire, there a cold wind. Long waves the whole year—restless, leafy and metallic,                                       the brightness of ash. The sunlight like something from Tarkovsky, one pointless, small ambition in which passion turns into a terrifying tenderness. Deep cargo in the hull; heartache. And somehow you knew you should light the match, like a person condemned to whom the starlight is another brief monument to what                                                                  is fallible. Your life, little fireling, little warlike starling, flickering indignantly, all erotic umbrage. Broken wing in my hand. Pathological, shy flame, I will care for you. Little shape of my fate, my certain failure. What                                     is desire, if not this burden. Dearth and glut cupped in your hands: wild, deadheaded, and blue.

[theclassicsreader]

Do we simply stare at what’s horrible and forgive it?

Richard Siken, from “Snow and Dirty Rain” 

[nevver]

The satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere, Lee Kyutae