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From English Lessons Book Two by the California State Text-Book Committee, 1903.
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I will always be this / quiet storm of blood pulled by the moon toward / the edge of myself.
Stevie Edwards, from “Poem in Which My Student Writes Me to Explain that There Are More of Him, that He Is Not the Only One Who Is Offended by Feminists,” published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal (via dulcifera)
Source: tinderboxpoetry.com
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.
There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl
from which you never return.
Louise Glück, from “Averno” (via horrorshow)
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
sheismyshe-deactivated20190201
i go quiet for days i turn the color of mirrors i turn the color of smoke men tell me sometimes that blue becomes me when i answer my voice is hoarse from disuse i am afraid of my body & the ways that it fails me
- Safia Elhillo, application for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl
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Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’d / and unterrified, through the long-loud and sweet-still / I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.
Olena Kalytiak Davis, from “Sweet Reader, Flanneled and Tulled,” Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (via lifeinpoetry)
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
Like someone not wanting something. Not anything. Mouth sewn shut. Eyelids sewn shut. I forgot myself. The wind inside. Everything shut, and the wind inside.
Alejandra Pizarnik, from “Paths of the Mirror,” Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972 (via lifeinpoetry)
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
wordsnquotes
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.
Andrew Wyeth (via mrsclarkkent)
Source: wordsnquotes.com
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
Our Bodies, Ourselves
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bpNichol - Still Water, 1970
h/t visual-poetry
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What is important is anyone’s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch with an electric hiss and cry this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, 248-249
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violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
If I were the moon I would shrink into a sand grain / In the corner of the poet’s eye, / While there’s still room.
James Wright, from Exile’s Home: The Poetry of James Wright; “A Secret Gratitude,”
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
every strand of your mother’s hair is silver moon
and half earth when her back is both your asylum
and your motherland. so if you need a map
in your own country, there is nothing wrong with you:
blame the fire. if you happen to watch unknown men
drag fallen logs into monster trucks and remember
your own brother, you will never see an open door without
the echo of your mother’s howl straining into thunder
it makes the sea escape. in every dream, you look
at your own fists and assume all guns are loaded. to you,
the stars have always been bullet holes across
night’s chest and when the dark comes blossoming
with red apples and rubble, you wonder what has become
of your land. what is it: shrine or slaughterhouse?
astagesetforcatastrophe, motherland (via astagesetforcatastrophe)
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violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
[She] shone in her passive way, like some faintly coloured sea anemone, who never budges, never stings, never—
Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Jacques Raverat written c. November 1923
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coocoolah-deactivated20190601
What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations, or fantasies that have no canon?
Lauren Berlant, Intimacy: A Special Issue (285)
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violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
To live is to cut in pieces and inevitably miss and then put the pieces back together.
Because, you see, it is only when one is at the end (of tenderness or of any other force) that one recognizes its inexhaustibleness.
The more we give, the more we have left; as soon as we give prodigiously — it flows forth! Let us bleed ourselves—and
here we are, a source of life!
Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Nine Letters with a Tenth Held Back and an Eleventh Received,”
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
ohhtheperiphery reblogged
violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
Emily Dickinson: Voices & Visions (1999) featured in the Annenberg series on American Poets (x)