“Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like “sunset” and “Paris.” Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus.” — The Girls, Emma Cline (via blackberrying)
(via kdfoewoalx-deactivated20180205)
“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them.” — Mary Oliver, from section one “Upstream,” Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin Press, 2016)
(via memoryslandscape-deactivated202)
“Of course, I think about my work when a black person dies, but I also think about my work when I see black people living. When I am at dinner with a friend and their song comes on, and they start to dance, because they can’t keep that happiness inside. When I’m at the barbershop and a see a young black child getting their first haircut, the wonder in their eyes when they look at their new self in the mirror. The narrative can’t just be ‘we are born black, and then we die.’ I’m so incredibly eager to write into the living space in between.” — Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, interviewed for Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series (via bostonpoetryslam)
(via leyla-a)
Admit it —
you wanted the end
with a serpentine
greed. How to negotiate
that strangling
mist, the fibrous
whisper?
To cease to exist
and to die
are two different things entirely.
But you knew this,
didn’t you?
Some days you knelt on coins
in those yellow hours.
You lit a flame
to your shadow
and ate
scorpions with your naked fingers.
So touched by the sadness of hair
in a dirty sink.
The malevolent smell
of soap.
When instead of swallowing a fistful
of white pills,
you decided to shower,
the palm trees
nodded in agreement,
a choir
of crickets singing
behind your swollen eyes.
The masked bird
turned to you
with a shred of paper hanging
from its beak.
At dusk,
hair wet and fragrant,
you cupped a goat’s face
and kissed
his trembling horns.
The ghost?
It fell prostrate,
passed through you
like a swift
and generous storm.Six Months after Contemplating Suicide, Erika L. Sánchez
“
June became July, which stretched into August. Apertures in the rhythm of the summer were growing. Firmly on the other side of the vernal equinox, the breach in time was tugging me away from the girl I was in the dressing room. Resolving to give purpose to the memory, I took my best friend to the ocean for her birthday. For me it was a reunion with the sea, after more than a decade of being unable to face one another. Having been given the gift of being seen, I freed my shoulders for the occasion.
As my best friend collected seashells behind me, I stepped into the waves. Watching my feet disappear into water, the tide picked up in response to my arrival. It’s capability for destruction was undetectable on this clear day in August. Embracing the current, I meditated on what we’d both seen in our 12 years apart. Heartache and hurricanes: necessary components that resulted in this homecoming. As I waved in response to my best friend’s call to come drink more wine, I thanked the afternoon in June for making way to this moment in time.
” — Devan Diaz, “Sometime In June”(via walkermargaret)
(via bentsahra)
“What can I say
(in this loneliness)” — June Jordan, from “One Minus One Minus One,” Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
(via lifeinpoetry)
(via leyla-a)
“You blossom under kindness, don’t you? Like a rose.” — Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel’s Inferno
(via willow)
(Source: wordsnquotes.com, via heart2big)
“Call me a sinner / Mock me maliciously; / I was your sleeplessness, / I was your grief.” — Anna Akhmatova, tr. by Judith Hemschemeyer, from Selected Poems; “I did not draw the curtains,”
(via violentwavesofemotion)
(via am1na1992)
