the blood of pens

the ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and the mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. - toni morrison

[yominari]

Who Said It Was Simple

by Audre Lorde

There are so many roots to the tree of anger   that sometimes the branches shatter   before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks the women rally before they march   discussing the problematic girls   they hire to make them free. An almost white counterman passes   a waiting brother to serve them first   and the ladies neither notice nor reject   the slighter pleasures of their slavery.   But I who am bound by my mirror   as well as my bed see causes in colour as well as sex

and sit here wondering   which me will survive   all these liberations.

[lameglet]

“The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I’d seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That’s not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That’s how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world.”

— Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward 

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Re-imagining Masculinity, Ocean Vuong

[yominari]

“He had not been praying, but dreaming—which, she would realize later, came to almost the same thing.”

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

[weltenwellen]

Hieu Nguyen, from “Pig”, Not Here

[lifeinpoetry]

      Fetal and feral, we curl in our beds.       Fetal and feral, we drink in the dusk,       hands damp with loam. Old cures for sadness       don’t work anymore—

— Sally Wen Mao, from “The Azalea Eaters,” Mad Honey Symposium

[soracities]

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

[Text ID: “And we cracked up. We cracked open. We fell apart like that, laughing.”]

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

“Fingers understand. Ecstasy becomes us all.”

— Five Poems by Toni Morrison; The Perfect Ease of Grain, Toni Morrison 

[lifeinpoetry]

How many times have you stopped short, breath jerked from the throat? To lose

yourself in the fall; to have lost it all to need, affliction. Crank the heart’s ugly lever, set this machine back

into motion.

— Mia Ayumi Malhotra, from “At the Cliff House,” Isako Isako

[yominari]

[ID: excerpt from on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

“I’m not scared of dying anymore.” (A pause, then laughter.) The cold, like river water, rises to their throats. Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.]

[toadschooled]

A green frog [Lithobates clamitans, formerly Rana clamitans] sitting in a flooded field below a mulberry tree. Image taken in Virginia by photographer John White.

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

It is still beautiful to hear the heart, but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

Seam; Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh, Tarfia Faizullah

[yominari]

Ocean Vuong, “Eurydice” from Night Sky With Exit Wounds

[dirbyagnesvarda]

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen

[yominari]

If you were god you would tell them to stop clapping. You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on. But you are not a god.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Re-imagining Masculinity, Ocean Vuong

[thepaige-turner]

“Her heart was poison. It was a close tangle of thorns. Even when it held love, that love came sharp, and she didn’t know how to offer it to anyone except with the edges out.”

— Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore