Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay

[x]

Mary Oliver, Summer Morning, from Red Bird

Fairytale

by Keetje Kuipers

Sometimes, when they disappear, men take a jelly jar of whiskey with them, and in late summer, when the river shrinks back from its skin like a child ashamed of undressing, the jars surface, full of sand and crumpled snail shell, in its seams. The daughters collect them, and we fill each one — with milk, silver buttons, crimson leaves losing color — though never with whiskey. We’re not trying to bring the fathers back.

Dulce María Loynaz, tr. by James O’Connor, from Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems

i love when. poems are. ❣️🌷💖

getting into bed on a December night by Ellen Bass

“you are my ease”

— Margaret Atwood, We Are Hard from Power Politics: Poems (via lunamonchtuna)

Stephen Dunn, What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009

on death with 1. lilies abounded, @petfurniture, twitter; 2. frances molina, “o’death”

i will never stop thinking about this poem my greek professor showed us

LIES ABOUT SEA CREATURES from ‘Bright Dead Things’ by Ada Limón

[image transcription:

‘LIES ABOUT SEA CREATURES

I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue

water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the 

coastal.

I never saw them. Not once that whole

frozen year.

Sure, I saw the raw white gannets hit the 

waves

So hard it could have been a showy blow

hole.

But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just

want

Something so hard you have to lie about it,

So you can hold it in your mouth for a 

minute,

How real hunger has a real taste. Someone

once

Told me gannets, those voracious sea birds

of the North Atlantic hill, go blind from

the height

and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a 

lie.

Gannets never go blind and they certainly 

never die.’

The lines ‘Sometimes, you just want/something so hard you have to lie about it,/so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute’ are highlighted in yellow. end id]