Words for Asteria

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them..

[smokefalls]

“I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore. No one would leave home until home is a voice in your ear saying—leave, run, now. I don’t know what I’ve become.”

—

Warsan Shire, “Home” from Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

[smokefalls]

“We’ll understand some things while we’re alive and some after we die. But it doesn’t really matter when it happens. What matters is that all the pain and all the sadness have meaning.”

—

Mieko Kawakami, Heaven (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

[smokefalls]

“I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.”

—

Warsan Shire, “Home” from Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

[dailynightvale]

“Fear is a reasonable response to life.”

— Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel 

[dailynightvale]

“You are fragile, and blind, and wanting, and stepping alone into the great darkness of the future.”

— Welcome to Night Vale | The Auction

[dailynightvale]

“It’s not other people that hurt us, but what we feel about them.”

— Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel

[dailynightvale]

“We wake up, we move on. No state is our state forever. All is fleeting.”

— Welcome to Night Vale | Lazy Day

[dailynightvale]

“The living tell the dying not to leave, and the dying do not listen. The dying tell us not to be sad for them, and we do not listen. The dialogue between the living and the dead is full of misunderstanding and silence.”

— Welcome to Night Vale | The Auction

[buttonpoetry]

“Wear your tongue like a cape. Throw up your fist like a secret you can’t keep any longer.”

— Denice Frohman - “Borders” (WoWPS 2014)

[lifeinpoetry]

i heard a woman becomes herself the first time she speaks without permission

then, every word out of her mouth a riot

— Denice Frohman, from “‘A Woman’s Place’,” Woman of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism

[jimxes]

“Your wound is probably not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility. At some point you need to let go and move on, and look at what you can change in the present.”

— Denice Frohman

[maybe-love-cant]

“Her accent is a stubborn compass always pointing her towards home”

— Accents, by Denice Frohman

[bloodworksbloodwords]

Remember that none of it killed me.

That all of it could have.

Dominique Christina

[lifeinpoetry]

They would rather watch the sun Be swallowed up by God Than to imagine you back

— Dominique Christina, from “Ghost Woman,” published in Moonchild Magazine

[buttonpoetry]

“Give that blood a Biblical name”

—

Dominique Christina

Read “The Period Poem” and more in ALIGHT!

[buttonpoetry]

“I’ll know he’ll never be strange fruit. He’ll never be broken open.”

— Dominique Christina - “For Emmett Till” (WoWPS 2014)

[buttonpoetry]

“It had been eighteen long years of textbooks filled with everything but me.”

— Dominique Christina & Denice Frohman - “No Child Left Behind”