Poetry Rb - Tumblr Posts

I lost every friendship I ever had and it still hurts.

1. Finneas O’Connell / 2. Ocean Vuong / 3. adampvrrish / 4. Otessa Moshfegh / 5. Fairycosmos / 6. Richard Siken / 7. frenchtoastlesbian

Watch me build a life and feel fed. I’ll leave hurt at the door. I am so painfully full of love. I could even say my heart is simple, again.

— Kayleb Rae Candrilli, from “Transgender heroic: all this ridiculous flesh,” Water I Won’t Touch

There’s enough light to drown in but never enough to enter the bones

& stay. 

— Ocean Vuong, from “Deto(nation),” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds

'“It’s the little cruelties that get you,” she told him. “Never the big hurts, the pains you can point to, and say, ‘Oh, I see this bruise,’ but the wounds that you can’t even tell are there until one day you are eating a bowl of fennel soup or sunbathing on the deck of the pool and you can’t move, you can’t do anything, because you think, Well, something is dead in me, what has been done to me, and why did I allow this to happen? And now, and now, and now…”’

- Regina Porter, The Travelers

“I have a photograph of you when we ate an orange in bed. What month was that in? What did you want from me? Every book is a book, is a thing you feel by yourself. You are here. I am alone in this poem.”

— Alex Dimitrov, You Were Blond Once (via sagmoonn)

“I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, “Will you bring me a glass of water?” I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, “Do you remember when you were a little boy and you would ask your mama to bring you a glass of water?” Yeah. “You know how half the time you weren’t even thirsty. You just wanted that hand that was attached to that glass that was attached to that person you just wanted to stay there until you fell asleep.” She took the glass of water that I brought her and just sat it down full on the table next to her. Wow, I thought. What am I gonna do with love like this.”

— One Night from Dito Montiel’s A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints

“Like many poets, I’m in love with how the word “stanza” comes from the Italian for “room,” or more literally, a “standing place.” I love thinking about how poems consist of rooms and can stand as houses, live as meeting places. I obsess about what kind of meetings a poem can bring about—surprising ones, strange ones. […] I’d like my poems to say (to myself, to a reader): you can bring all of yourself into these rooms, including what you have yet to know about yourself, your worlds, your dreams. Your myths and questions, yes.”

— Chen Chen, from his interview with 32 poems

Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1923–1927

“I was young here. Riding the subway with my small book as though to defend myself against the same world: you are not alone, the poem said, in the dark tunnel.”

“But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going.”

Anne Bentley / Louise Glück, October / Jack Anderson, A Poet's Guide to the Subway / Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 / Holly Warburton

5 poems about gay teenage sexual experimentation

marie howe, “practicing,” 1998

ocean vuong, “on earth we’re briefly gorgeous” (excerpt), from night sky with exit wounds, 2014

angie sijun lou, “jessica gives me a chill pill” (excerpt), 2018

danez smith, “seroconversion,” from don’t call us dead, 2017

richard siken, “you are jeff” (excerpt), from crush, 2005

A year in fragments

i. Jenny Xie, from Eye Level: Poems; “Zuihitsu” ii. February 1, 1922, The Diaries of Franz Kafka iii. March 5, 1922, The Diaries of Franz Kafka iv. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing v. Charlotte Brontë  — Jane Eyre vi. John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent vii. Charlotte Brontë  — Jane Eyre viii. Raymond Carver ix. James Baldwin, Just Above My Head// Lea Malot x. L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables xi. Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Elizabeth Holland (early November 1865) xii. Natalie Diaz, “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word.” Postcolonial Love Poem

home is the first grave

unknown // catherine lacey // chen chen // silas denver melvin // aloha from hell, richard kadrey // courtney love prays to oregon // unknown // st. lucy’s home for girl’s raised by wolves // x // taylor swift’s “my tears ricochet” // this post @ceemetery

my kofi

leonard cohen’s final letter to his muse, marianne ihlen

“Love is so embarrassing. I bled in your bed. I’m sorry. I have built you a shore with all my best words & still, the waves.”

— Claire Schwartz, from Bound

this is going to have me on my hands and knees dry heaving

they should invent a profound love between two people that doesnt involve the power and chance of doing profound hurt

some of my favorite tiny love stories

“I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.”

— Eileen Myles, “Universal Cycle.” The Importance of Being Iceland. (via llleighsmith)

having to come to terms with the fact that love is not an everlasting performance in which you attempt to retain the attention of your significant other but rather a release of control and putting faith into them and trusting them to choose to stay with you no matter what you have to offer