April. So Long.
Tag: feelings
The Heart of It All
when i was a lot younger, i wanted to write pocket-size books that are so portable that you can carry anywhere with you. you can have it while you have your coffee in the morning, in your commute, in between meetings, and late at night when you can’t seem to fall asleep.
you can have it when you feel a slight discomfort from today’s misfortunes, when you’re lonely and feeling alone, when you’re filled with sadness but also when you’re ebullient with joy and gratitude, when you see the sun rises in the first morning in april. my words with you there, and everywhere.
we will never have to feel alone again. we will always have each other to listen and care. we will have that april sun shining down on us, the wonder of things, the heart of it all.
when something rips out of the ground —dandelion, garlic, an entire life, there should be a minute when things are allowed to be raw.
let the earth still clip the roots. let the root be pulp and wet and indeterminate. uncertain.
the rushing, always, to replant, to make meaning, to say aloud: this has made me, as if movement away from pain is the only moral posture.
what we need most, really, is inertia: to lie within the bruise to see its colours changing overtime without putting any word on it. to be permitted a dull, unproductive grief that does not serve a future lesson.
i have been in rooms with people who wanted an arc sooner than i could give it. who are you now? what did you learn?
honestly? i am not ready for the new sobriquet. i refuse to be within the tyranny of usefulness.
i want to sleep and then start awaking, without the internal wobble that follows. let it be uncertain, for once. let’s not name it anything other than nothing.
there is tenderness in not naming everything immediately. there is relief in being allowed to be messy, to carry weight for a while without being judged for not having done enough with it.
i would make it mandatory that after anything that breaks you, there is at least one stretched week—one small, sacred river-of-minutes—where you cannot be called anything other than the person who is still, quietly mending. without expectations. only the simple, radical work of not needing to mean anything yet.
Sontag once said that interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art, that to interpret is to impoverish.
the same can be said of pain: to over-interpret it, to rush it into symbols, is to impoverish the real. to let go, in this Sontagian sense, is to resist the pressure of metaphor and instead inhabit the raw, unclassified minute. without neither sobriquet, nor emblem. just the difficult, ordinary fact of being here.
and perhaps that is the only kind of survival worth naming. it resists the language that would make them exemplary. it lingers, holding open the right not to be defined.
with that in mind, you are everything you need to be.
the universe inside, this wholeness, this warmth, is meant to be shared.
the act of reaching out, overcoming shame, loneliness, resisting the system that alienates us all, are the very essence of survival. it’s peak humanity.
there’s an epidemic of loneliness that starves us in rapid proportions, and we might be able to do something about it.
i’d like to take part, however small, in fighting it, surviving it. i deeply believed we need to keep grounding ourselves in nature and in each other. we have to try. we have to create space to grieve, to nurture joy, to have each other.
when was the last time you had a conversation that felt loving, that was pouring into your cup, that gave you a breath of fresh air? let’s have one today.
©2025 maiadiaries.uk, all rights reserved.
You Are Wonderful xx
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future.
To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.
Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
May you always picture where you are as where you’re meant to be.
May you take in your surroundings like you visited especially.
May you share brews and bruises and may you do this tenderly. You are the most improved you there has ever been.
May you be seriously silly, may you be wickedly kind.
May you be brilliantly dumb sometimes and yet stupidly bright.
May you certainly have doubts, may your weirdness be the norm.
May the coolest thing about you be your warmth.
May you be powerfully vulnerable, or at least mightily soft.
May you be a contradiction, and yet at the same time not.
And, whether you are any, none or all of the above, above all, may you know that you are loved.
May you always make room for playfulness.
It may just save your life. And trust whatever makes your heart grow cannot be a waste of time.
And you are never too busy to catch your breath.
Just as you cannot be in traffic without being traffic, life is not something that you are stuck in while it happens. There is more in you than you could possibly imagine.
The very fact that you exist makes everything a bit more magic.
When it all feels too much and there is little you can do, may you still see the best in people and may people include you.
May one thing match the gravity of all you’ve ever done. This wonderful reality: the best is yet to come.
Life, Lately
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Het Verdriet van België
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Time Is Not Going Anywhere
Must We Speak Love
In these tough times, must we speak about love, flowers, books, and poetry and rainbows? Yes we must.
Writers must write, and poets must keep poetry flowing through their brain into longing souls.
We must let our words do what they do, and that is to exist as tomorrow is not promised.
We must wake up with our hearts open, tending to our being on earth with patience and care.
We must brew our coffee and look around us and keep each other safe, and not let any force divide us.
We must remember, feel, love in everything we say, and do. We must be kind, or try to be. As much as we can.
We must press gently each other’s wounds to acknowledge them and take them into our consideration before we speak.
We must embrace the differences of our skin and love all colours and marvel at the oranges of the sunset, and rainbows at the end of stormy rain.
We must keep each other close to our hearts. And our minds, and remind each other of hope and compassion, the long road ahead of us.
We must treat heartache, misunderstanding, baseless assumptions, misplaced hostility as parts of our humaneness.
We must not forget our humility, our tenderness, our blossoming into the vast forest that is life, our becoming.
We must consider others’ hearts, sorrow in their face, their vulnerability, so we can start our path into generosity.
We must thank each other, and look each other in the eye, and speak low.
We must teach each other to sit with our discomforts so there will be less shouting, lashing out, anger and frustration.
We must understand differences and try to find peaceful middle ground. Build one. Make one.
We must think of children, waterfalls, the lakes and the seas. The quiet wisdom from the oceans that have been carrying out the earth for centuries.
We must study resilience from that of wildflowers sprouting everywhere in the cold and rain and snow.
We must touch the grass to feel the softness of our hands. To remind us that we are capable of loving. That we are love. And therein, we must speak love.
We must begin, again.
What I Know Now
Tell No One
There’s too much loneliness in this world, and around me. If only I could slice up my heart real nice and evenly, I would share it with everyone I knew so they would feel less lonely.
I would tell Father, I’d always be around and he could have all of me. I would tell Grampy, I was proud to have his eyes and his kindness. His wisdom ran in my blood. I would tell brother, he could share with me his love for Mother and the burden of existence never have to fall on his shoulder, I would carry it with him.
I have so much loneliness in me, so much more than I could bear. Mother gave it to me one night the first time she was standing on the ledge near the window in our thirty stories high three bedrooms flat. She was in love with heights, so every night she took the dragons out and played with them outside by the window. She’d learn to fly. And fall.
I got so lonely every time she did, for this grave feeling seeping through my skin, that she would fly (or fall) and would never find her way back to me (and Father). She had certain ways of seeing life and death. Most of the time, to her there was no difference in both. But at times she saw death as a release, and life was a cage in which one could only see what was not and could never feel what was real. What was real she saw in dreams.
She shared these dreams with me. She wrote them in a diary. Tell no one, she said to me.
In her dreams, I was born into her world. I was her.
Read more here.
©️2019 All rights reserved.
There Is More Than You Believe
The longest con of all is that after a lifetime of attempting to remain an unshakable force, you will find yourself strolling the streets of Sicily on a Thursday afternoon with two glasses of red wine in your system, and you will be brought to tears by the sight of a beautiful old lady being illuminated by the setting of the sun as she cradles an orange in her hands like it’s some sort of precious relic or maybe the reincarnation of an old friend.
That is when you will find that there is love in most (if not all) things.
There is obviously love in intimate embraces, songs, poetry, and photographs, but there is also love in buying groceries for one.
There is also love in cleaning your room with the windows open and keeping warm with thrifted clothes that first belonged to somebody you will never know.
There is love at the bottom of the bottle of cheap screw top wine that you open before dinner and in the crumbs of olive oil cake scattered across your grandmother’s tablecloth.
Yes, there is love in languid summer nights spent next to a beautiful, brilliant man who kisses you softly and slowly and hangs on to your every word, but there is just as much love in long commutes on public transit.
There is love to be squeezed out of every fruit shared with somebody who makes your life brighter. And there is more love than you’ll believe in a sandwich from the deli down the street.
There is love in difficult conversations. There is love in anger and in hatred and there is love in indifference, too.
There is love in holding somebody to your chest and there is an incomprehensible amount of love in letting them go. Letting go of somebody you love is to say “be free” both to them and to yourself—that is why the best lovers are often leavers, too.
There is love in having tea and oranges with somebody who you know is a temporary fixture and sitting side by side while you listen to the boats go by as they soon will, too. There is love in that.
There is a love that will cut you so deeply that every decision you make as a result of it will give you no choice but to plead lunacy.
There is even love, deluded as it may be, in the soul-shattering corners of heartache and addiction and grief and terror and politics. There is love in places where it never belonged in the first place, and it is up to you to lead it home to safer waters.
There is love all over your face—your face exists because two people once loved each other so much that they couldn’t get close enough. You were conceived by some bout of passion, misguided or not. No matter how far back in your lineage you have to trace it, there is love somewhere.
I can promise you that you will find love wherever you look for it, even if you have to squint to see it.
I can promise you that if you see love in everything, then love will see everything in you, too. That is the very best of what I know to be true, and there is no other song to be sung.
Love, I Don’t Love You Just Yet
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The Cure for Anything
Saturday Binge
We Are Good
This morning
I got a stack of papers from sophomore lit. The top two
had the author’s name misspelled. I’ve not yet looked at
any others. I talked in class about how Art Spiegelman
chose realism over sentiment, how we conflate historical time
with personal time, how on 9/11 I took my nine-month old son
to his first day of day care and the city expoloded, went up
in smoke, and no one but me cares that he spent hours there,
only nine months old, while we watched TV in our phone-jammed
airspace, breathed in fumes, tried to give blood, wondered was there
anywhere, anywhere we could or should flee to?—
Nothing disastrous happened this week. Not so far. Unless you count
what I saw next, between classes on my way to read student poems
at Empanada Mama’s on 48th and 9th. A teenage boy lying on his side
in the middle of the street. The traffic stopped and a crowd watched
while six or seven other boys ran back and forth and stamped down
hard on his skull. I turn a gag into a kind of cough and dial 911
We’ve already called the fucking police, says a woman as I retch
into an empty trash can. Finally three teenage girls surround the boy
and the other boys move off.
When I get home
and try to describe the boy in the street Josh says, More people died
in Iraq this month than any other and I remind him that tomorrow morning,
before the new table is due to be delivered, we’re going to Saint Vincent’s
Hospital where Dr. Margano will put the KY-covered wand inside me
and tell us if these past nine weeks have yielded a fetal heartbeat
which will change everything, nothing.
Here, Again
I Make Do With Little
nice things
let’s chat, you and i.
These are the conversations we could have had. We’d have a cuppa. I could have waited for you, with a notebook. You’d have yours. We would write together in one peaceful afternoon.
Let’s make that happen.
I’ll tell you my stories and you yours. We will share how we feel about them then and now.
We’ll come back to these moments as memories. Something sweet we remember as life carry us through.
This is personal, and private. It’s time. It’s long overdue.
Let’s chat, just you and I. Let’s sit together, learn breathing lessons, and observe our thoughts in our most loving selves.
I made this in PDF so you can print them out, but honestly, it works better here in the paperback edition.
Let’s write together, and for always.
Apply PRIV50 here. I’ll see you inside!
Here On Earth
sit beneath the shade of a barberry’s branches and understand that generosity is older than thought. trees feed the weak. they slow their growth for the young. they give what is theirs to the sick. on this there is no debate.
run your fingers over moss-covered bark and know you’re touching layers of time. a tree’s outer skin is also its diary, marked by drought and storm and calm. it bears itself freely, wearing its history.
notice the ragged years after a mass flowering, when trees look bare and exhausted. beauty often requires sacrifice. our generosity leaves us vulnerable. but it also ensures a certain blooming; that the dance will go on.
watch insects devour a leaf, and understand: being alive means being part of a whole, not above of one. we all give. we are all taken from. you are not the exception.
observe the way seedlings wait in the earth for years, sometimes decades. patience is a strategy. timing is everything. growth is not always immediate. readiness is the only door.
much like trees, we are the improbable survivors of a vast and silent lottery. the odds of you reading this, breathing, are as slim as a beech seed becoming a forest elder: your life is, by all accounts, a statistical fluke. our heart beats, our lungs fill, but like trees who endure storms and rot to one day blossom, we are the rarest outcome of a million failed tries.
and when a seed does catch in the earth perfectly, prepared to sprout, survival is still a rarity, aging an even more unlikely accident of chance. so too with us. we are not guaranteed survival. we are not guaranteed joy. and yet we still spend ourselves— our time, our strength, our youth— on the sensible, human work of living. we raise children, plant gardens, write poems, and fall in love; make soup, care for aging parents, whistle and cry and pray and believe in one other.
My offering to you on this gray December morning is this: I want you to understand, in your heart, inside your bloodstream, deep in your marrow, that everything will always hurt your feelings and that’s a good thing. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald describing Gatsby, you have something rare and special, a “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” “an extraordinary gift for hope,” “a romantic readiness” that’s precious and worthy of respect.
When you’re aligned with this truth, you recognize that your huge heart makes it very, very frightening to invest in what you love. Your heightened sensitivity makes it extremely difficult to stick with the people, places, and things that light you up the most. Your ebullient soul will sometimes abandon what you need the most and you won’t even know why. You will simply lose the thread, get distracted, move on, withdraw, and you won’t recognize what you’re doing.
But when you dare to feel the pain of being what you are — a sensitive instrument, an open window, a tiny bird perched on the shaky limb of a huge tree in a windstorm, fragile and uncertain and volatile and wildly alive — you gain renewed respect for yourself. You understand why the world is so hard on you. When you respect this pain, you can feel vibrant inside your sensitivity, passionate inside your fear, hungry inside your anger, soulful inside your sadness, brilliant inside your anxious need for more love.
Maya, On Being a Poet
Hello. Just checking in here to share a rather emotional insight from a poet I really like, Maya C. Popa, upon her upcoming poetry book, If You Love That Lady.
I am sharing this because I feel seen, and I hope everyone in similar place feel seen as well, and those who are not, to gain a perspective and be kind in their discomfort. Cheers.
Dear Friends,
I wondered whether poets might simply not be wired for self-promotion. If it might be possible that the “poetry gene” is antithetical to the “promo” one. That would honestly be great, because then I’d be off the hook. I could leave promotion to the prose writers and not feel like I was shortchanging a step of the process.
Poets aren’t bad at self-promotion because we’re inherently humble, shy, and allergic to marketing, but because the habits that sustain poetry have very little to do with the habits required to promote it. In fact, the skills we cultivate by writing the poem—attention, interiority, precision—have almost nothing to do with the work required to share it. Promotion can feel like an assault on the inner world by the outer one.
We’re all familiar with a certain mythos around the “true” artist who is so pure, she doesn’t care at all about sales or self-promotion. In that paradigm, promotion is “selling out” and misses the true goal of poetry.
What I’ve noticed is that this belief often comes from the same constituency who lament that the country is illiterate, that poetry is undervalued, and that writers “shouldn’t have to” promote their own books.
We create a culture of shame around ambition or outreach while simultaneously disparaging readers—or potential readers—for not choosing us.
As always, I want us to look at these thinking traps with compassion. I am not telling you to feel differently, but inviting you to understand why you feel the way you do, and to encourage you to choose a more empowering story, one that puts your considerable power back in your hands.
Most poets don’t earn meaningful income from books, and that’s ok. Most poets don’t write for the promise of financial renumeration. My goal has never been to live off of book sales, and I am completely at ease with this.
I mention the financials of poetry simply because, I suspect, they help explain why self-promotion can feel like labor without payoff. And I think we might benefit from resetting our expectation of what promotion means and what it’s good for. Not for a paycheck or a bottomline, but for reaching readers who might enjoy our work and deepening engagement with our community.
Each time I send out a newsletter about my own writing, I am haunted by the thought of strangers rolling their eyes and unsubscribing. I am worried that people will think that I am hungry for attention, self-absorbed, or that I must think I’m so great to be talking about my own writing.
The reality is that promoting my books or my writing community means tolerating discomfort almost daily. I’ve realized I may never be fully comfortable with promotion.
If I’ve learned anything, though, it’s that discomfort cannot be avoided. There is as much discomfort in not speaking up and not sharing my poetry as there is in being visible and advocating for my work or teaching. And I often experience a sense of pride on the other side of doing something I find uncomfortable.
After I finished the book, I felt a renewed sense of momentum around simply acting, even in the face of unease. I was reminded how fundamentally normal rumination is, and how I can only choose whether or not to take it seriously.
So, if you also have a book forthcoming, I want to invite you to practice saying, My book is coming out, and I’d love it if you would consider preordering. Even if it feels counterintuitive, awkward, or pushy to let people know that a thing you wrote for yourself, and for them, is about to enter the world.
You may never feel entirely good about this part of the writing journey, and that’s ok. You can still take action: announce the class, share your recent publication, post the preorder link even if your brain tries to keep you “safe” by discouraging the actions that support your goals. You can withstand a few minutes of discomfort in service of your long-term vision and in integrity with your aspirations.
Love,
xM
Late Poems
the human heart is not exactly bright red.
it is dusk-lit and moth-bitten,
the colour of traffic at rush hour,
of midnight soup gone cold on the stove,
of pass-midnight texts,
and letters written too late
then folded again and again,
creased in pockets like timelines
we forgot to live.
the heart speaks in pulses.
the body answers in static.
i wrote you letters i didn’t send.
then i did. then i lost track
of the version i meant to send.
the heart does that too.
it remembers only the most recent rewrite
for something as soft as memory.
i knew, the way the body knows
the weather of someone else’s motion
some dreams don’t start as dreams.
they arrive like postcards from another life:
i am in a storm.
i am the storm.
i am running.
i am you.
in dreams,
everything means everything,
but only in the way
the heart means when it flinches
when we’re not in dreams,
our bodies unsure what to do with themselves.
my memory: a black sea.
my heart: a clock without hands.
the heart echoes a truth so deep
it sounds like a secret.
sometimes it grows quiet
like the air before a storm.
sometimes, it doesn’t stop.
and maybe we used to be one person.
split by time.
maybe that’s why your pain shows up
in my limbs.
because
the heart is not a metaphor.
it’s the thing that is still moving
after everything else
gives up.
from my hearts. ©️all rights reserved.
Kindness Makes Me Go Ah
Kindness grows teeth sometimes, but they’re made of sugar. They melt when you look at them too long. I hold one on my tongue until it disappears, and I think, this is what it means to care for something that doesn’t belong to you.
The clover keeps multiplying behind my eyes. I blink and it’s a meadow. I blink again and it’s a mirror. In it, I see myself saying ah, like I’ve just remembered a song I use to sing before I knew what words were.
Love isn’t for building or breaking or even keeping warm. It’s a cloud that doesn’t know it’s raining. It drifts into your mouth, and you swallow it, and then you have to learn to speak gently, because the cloud lives there now.
I think the beluga is still swimming, even when I stop believing in oceans. I think kindness swims, too — it loops around, forgets its name, finds it again in someone’s half-asleep voice. I think we go ah not because it’s easy, but because something inside us wants to be touched without being asked why.
And maybe that’s the whole idea— not for love, not for anything, really — just for the quiet sound of ah, soft as breath, soft as forgiveness, soft as learning to stay.
Kindness leans against the door as if it knows I am still learning to hold things without owning them.
Some days, my want grows wings. My want doesn’t go far, but it keeps trying. It circles the clover, small and dizzy, the way love circles us — shy, relentless, pretending not to care.
The beluga rises again in my mind. I imagine her exhaling a silver thread that ties the whole ocean together — my heart, your hands, the moon’s tired shoulder. All of it shimmering and infinite.
I think that’s what softness means — it’s willing. Willing to dissolve, to laugh in the middle of crying, to open your palms and let the meadow grow wild.
I keep saying ah, a small devotion, a secret handshake with the world. Ah for the clover. Ah for the sugar. Ah for the breath that stays kind, even when no one’s listening.
*this is a copyrighted work and is part of my book.
No One Sees What You See
I Will Know to Wait For You
Life is Only This Much
I want to say you’re right
that knowing strikes like lightning,
burns the tree down to its core,
splits the bark so clean you can read
the rings of your own recklessness.
But if I’m honest, most days are
a slow shuffle of mismatched intentions
where rain is already waiting.
Sometimes a stranger’s glance
unbuttons the air,
a life I almost lived.
I don’t always know what to call it,
but it feels like a door creaking open
in a house I thought was abandoned.
It feels like the first sip of water
when you aren’t sure if you’re thirsty.
And soon I’ll be back to asking
whether my convictions belong to me at all
I live among the scatter of fallen things,
the brief certainties,
the small mistakes that still made sense.
And when the air turns colder,
I will wrap myself a new moon,
and when it warms again,
I will set the coat aside.
Life is only this much:
the willingness to stand still long enough
to notice the light changing.
Things So Beautiful They Hurt
what i love is how it stayed
the only light outside
binge thinking and everything else
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my dearest, my love,
Ultimately,
we will lose each other to something. I would hope for grand circumstance – death or disaster.
But it might not be that way at all.
It might be that you walk out one morning after making love… and never return, or I fall in love with another man.
It might be a slow drift into indifference.
Either way, we’ll have to learn to bear the weight of the eventuality that we will lose each other to something.
So why not begin now, while your head rests like a perfect moon in my lap, and the dogs on the beach are howling?
Why not reach for the seam…, just a little, so the falling can begin?
Because later, when we cross each other on the streets, and are forced to look away,
when we’ve thrown the disregarded pieces of our togetherness into bedroom drawers and the smell of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet decay of lilies —
what will we call it, when it’s no longer love?
Tishani Doshi
hestia
dogs
As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.
Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.
And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
But now, my bark a ghost in this strange scentless air
I am no growling cicerone or cerberus,
But wreckage for the pound, snuffling in shame
Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this.
As for his talk, well, I took no special notice.
His love of the war poets was well known.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti | Weldon Kees | August Kleinzahler
If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait
all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you
must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one
of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and
low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak,
you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they
will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or
someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to
speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel
you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit,
or placed behind a door—this will depend on what kind of a dog you
want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though
you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn
to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You
must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string,
or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once
you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better
to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not—
a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to
love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much
as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but
never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your
children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity;
you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how
to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk
enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show
your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog,
you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all.
It’s June
Soulmates
My soulmates are scattered all over the world, lost and shivering, cold and alone, or happy and warm, laughing and dancing, but still longing for me.
My soulmates are scratching and clawing to get closer to me, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively, sometimes without even knowing what they’re doing.
My soulmates are climbing up tiny blades of grass, anxious for a glimpse of my boots plowing through the green tangle, ready to grip the edges of my pants and climb, climb, climb to their destinies.
My soulmates can’t wait to bury their heads in my neck, breathe in my scent and then shove their entire heads under my skin and drink my red hot blood.
My soulmates say “Turn yourself into a tasty roast beef sub so I can eat it standing up in the middle of my living room.”
My soulmates say, “Send me strands of your hair in the mail with a note attached, handwritten, something about how you want me to clip your toenails and shampoo your carpets and clean out your gutters for centuries to come.”
My soulmates can’t stop thinking about me, even when they’re tumbling around in the dryer or drifting above the ground with their friends, waiting for the pressure to change.
My soulmates want more of me, more more more. They want to rain down on my head or keep the sunshine off my back. They just need to be closer. Everything bad about me is good to them.
“Every word you write belongs in a book,” they whisper as I’m typing another worthless newsletter post. “No one could ever tire of your words. Make yourself into a ham biscuit so I can rub it all over my face.”
My soulmates love me exactly as I am: the absolute worst, hot blood pulsing relentlessly through my unguarded neck, tangles of impossibly frizzy hair to climb, the stench of too much work and worry floating like a dark cloud around my head.
My soulmates wish there was more of me to go around. They know I have an ant bite or a tick bite on my neck that itches. They know I woke up at 4 am and wondered, “Ant or tick, ant or tick? Tick bites normally don’t sting. When I swatted at my neck, there was a crumpled black ant there.
My soulmates know I’m awful but that’s what they crave the most, my awfulness. They’ve longed for my terrible company for what feels like centuries. Of course I’ll be a big disappointment. That’s the whole point, that’s what makes it so romantic in the first place.
My soulmates want me to know that the things I consider romantic aren’t just empty novelties, reasons to work too hard for nothing, excuses to scrape and claw up a blade of grass, into the executive suite, across a continent, doomed from start to finish. … You smell like precious metals, you taste like springtime, you make me laugh until my tongue falls out.
My soulmates can’t get closer to me. They waste all day climbing one blade of grass and I never even walk by, or they write entire books about me that I never read.
They hum little love songs that they’ll never record because there’s just too much feeling there, or they daydream about me while spending most of their time with people they don’t like that much, doing jobs they don’t enjoy, wishing everything were different.
Don’t do that, I try to tell them. Be awful instead, and see who shows up. Your entire world is packed with soulmates and you don’t even know it. It ends up sounding so condescending when I say these things, but my soulmates love it when I condescend to them. It makes them growl and whine.
But I mean, look at me. Terrible. Pulling grass out of the driveway and then sitting there, shaking the dirt off the grass and scattering worms and mud all over my clothes with the solemn reverence of a priest swinging an incense burner through the aisles of a cathedral.
Or dancing in my ugly kitchen first thing in the morning, as if I believe that I’m a supernatural being who owns the sun and the moon and the stars.
No one can fuck with my good life. Nothing’s gonna bring me down. Nothing’s gonna change my world.
from Heather Havrilesky
Sunday Pastische
the knowing, the plot that calls me to live
the me to your me time
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hope
If I could survive here, with these simple wants, I’d be happy.
I just want to listen to music, read books, eat food, drink beer & occasionally whiskey, dance, and travel, see my friends & spend my time with you.
Last day of April. Early morning sun, open windows & birdsong. Saturday quiet as the city sleeps in. Momentary stillness.
A cup of coffee & a book equals peace.
At least right now. The temporariness of it all doesn’t matter. True spring on the horizon.
The mistake of placing hope in seasons, to look forward to the days to come & expect things to be better.
Gina Myers
somewhere, right now, maybe right here
If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something among people, then let this be prearranged now, between us, while we are still peoples:
that at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love),
I will be standing at the edge of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,
and though there will be no poetry between us then, at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas, I hope you will take it,
and remember on earth I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw, and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.
Somewhere right now someone is peeling an orange for a person they love. They are digging their thumbs and picking at the fly-away strings of pulp and holding the bald orb up softly, like it was the easiest thing in the world to take on the task. This isn’t even the nicest thing they’ve ever done. They will go on to do countless other radically minuscule and kind things.
Right now, somewhere, people are paused at a doorway, maybe leaning their shoulder blades on it or propping it open with their ankle, their elbow, all because there is someone else right behind them who is heading out. Right now someone is crouched down to teach a kid how to tie their shoes.
Somewhere, right now in our world, people are complimenting a bright shirt, a peachy cheek tint, a funky hair clip. Someone is saying I got it as they pay for both coffees. Someone somewhere right at this moment is giving a thumbs up. Maybe a reassuring nod along with it. Right now someone is winking from across the room.
Somewhere right now (maybe right here) someone is looking for a bit of proof that life is in fact good, and your face comes immediately to mind as solid and unshakeable evidence for their inquiry, maybe the image of your face smirking as you hold up a peeled and perfect orange.
Mark Ruefle | jess janz
The world then opens up like a flower. You’re a raindrop falling over a petal and over a turtle’s deep green shell and you’re not alone because every molecule of oxygen you breathe in has a name you know by heart. And falling doesn’t mean drowning and drowning doesn’t mean drowning either.
time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
Kaothar Kadir | Jorge Luis Borges
Everything Our Hands Touch is Glass
On the plane I have a dream l’ve left half my torso on the back porch with my beloved. I have to go
back for it, but it’s too late, l’m flying and there’s only half of me.
My shards are showing, I think. But I do not know what I mean so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands
of headstones behind it. Minuscule flags, plastic flowers.
Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there.
Ada Limón
I hope it does go on and on forever, the little pain, the little pleasure, the sun a blood orange in the sky, the sky parrot blue and the day unfolding like a bird slowly spreading its wings, though I know, saying it, that it won’t.
Susan Wood
Allyson Dinneen
here is still
every little thing of every big thing, for everyone everywhere
Inside you, there is a god and a worm. You spend your years building alters of salt to the worm. And the god? You leave her in the dust.
I wake up tasting metal. I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, expecting to find the sharp edge of something broken, but there is nothing. I expected blood, but found only the smooth film of morning. Still, I swallow, just in case. Sometimes, I think my body is full of things I don’t remember taking in. Words I never said. Hands that never held mine. Knives that never cut me, but still left scars.
Pain has become something else. Something that no longer belongs to the realm of flesh or bone. It is a distant hum now, a vibration that passes through me but does not touch me. Time slips through my fingers like sand, and there is no urgency to retrieve it. I think I must have fallen asleep, though I cannot remember when.
I count the seconds, as though counting will ground me. As though knowing when the next tick will come could save me. But there is no rhythm to the passage of time anymore. I’ve swallowed the knife, the very thing that was meant to hurt me, and now I can’t tell where the pain ends and I begin.
Outside, the world is burning. I wonder if anyone is warming their hands.
there is a madness to love that tastes like salt. we sit at the edge of the ocean and talk about the beauty of the waves, the way they reach for the shore with hungry hands, pulling it in only to be pushed away again. But no one speaks of the undertow—how beneath that rhythm lies a current that could swallow you whole, dragging you into depths that don’t offer return. love is much the same: you learn to swim in it, to hold your breath against its pull, but some are too eager to be consumed, forgetting the ocean can be a cruel goddess.
the sun, like this madness, is not gentle. it was never meant to be. it does not hold you with tender hands or cradle you in soft light. it grips you by the throat, forcing you to bear witness to your own unraveling. no, it is a fever in the blood, a force that gnashes its teeth against the barriers we build around ourselves. the kind of passion that makes you lose track of time, of breath, of who you are. you tell yourself you can handle it, that you can balance between the pull of gravity and the intoxication of flight, but the higher you climb, the more the heat licks at your soul, the more the ground becomes a distant memory.
solomon once wrote of passion: “it is necessary that we choose our emotions, in much the same way that we choose our actions.” but does love, in its purest, most maddening form, truly give us a choice? or are we slaves to it? perhaps the real tragedy is not the fall, but the fact that we choose it. love is a decision to step into the fire knowing full well it will burn us beyond recognition. and yet, we lean in, driven by some primal need to feel the heat that makes us forget everything else, like a moth to flame. you think you can hold onto yourself, but love is patient, relentless—it wears you down until you become unrecognizable even to yourself. maybe that’s the truth icarus saw in the sun: that to love is to willingly dissolve. to lose shape, to let the heat twist you into something, just the essence of self – ousia
SHYAM, Little Notes in Reverie
There’s a certain quiet violence in realizing you’ll never know most people deeply. You’ll never see the little rituals that hold them together. Never hear the thing they say out loud when they’re alone in the car. Never know how they feel about rain on Tuesdays, or whether they sleep with one leg out of the blanket, or who first taught them how to be kind.
It’s beautiful, in that aching way. But it’s also a little tragic. All these full, complex lives crashing into each other for a moment—on sidewalks, in elevators, at gas stations—and then disappearing, entirely, into the stream of what-ifs and might-have-beens.
some days i think if someone loved me completely, it would undo something quiet and necessary in me. not because love is frightening, but because love, when it’s not careful, begins to expect consistency. and i’ve never been consistent. they fall in love with one version, the one that felt effortless in the moment, and want her to stay. but she’s already changing. sometimes i wish someone could sit beside all the versions of me and not ask them to agree. to be held in contradiction without being asked to resolve.
love, when it becomes surveillance, stops feeling like recognition and starts feeling like measurement. it watches too closely. it mistakes steadiness for closeness. it forgets that knowing someone isn’t just looking at them hard enough, it’s letting them move and still choosing to see them.
when someone loves the version of you they’ve memorised, every evolution feels like betrayal. every shift becomes a threat. and suddenly, becoming yourself feels like leaving them.
some days i want to be adored. other days i want to disappear. not because i am difficult to love, but because i do not always want to be interpreted. i do not want to be someone’s revelation. someone’s mirror. i do not want to be your favourite version of me. i want to be seen, even when what’s visible shifts. even when what’s visible contradicts what came before.
love isn’t a still frame. it isn’t fidelity to an image. it is motion. it is recognition that survives the blur.
There is obviously love in intimate embraces, songs, poetry, and photographs, but there is also love in buying groceries for one. There is also love in cleaning your room with the windows open and keeping warm with thrifted clothes that first belonged to somebody you will never know.
There is love at the bottom of the bottle of cheap screw top wine that you open before dinner and in the crumbs of olive oil cake scattered across your grandmother’s tablecloth. Yes, there is love in languid summer nights spent next to a beautiful, brilliant man who kisses you softly and slowly and hangs on to your every word, but there is just as much love in long commutes on public transit.
There is just as much love in the eyes of the drunkards at the bar. There is love in the words of the scriptures, despite how often they are weaponized, and there is love to be squeezed out of every fruit shared with somebody who makes your life brighter. And there is more love than you’ll believe in a sandwich from the deli down the street.
There is love in difficult conversations. There is love in anger and in hatred and there is love in indifference, too. There is love in holding somebody to your chest and there is an incomprehensible amount of love in letting them go. Letting go of somebody you love is to say “be free” both to them and to yourself—that is why the best lovers are often leavers, too.
There is love in having tea and oranges with somebody who you know is a temporary fixture and sitting side by side while you listen to the boats go by as they soon will, too. There is love in that. There is a love that will cut you so deeply that every decision you make as a result of it will give you no choice but to plead lunacy. There is even love, deluded as it may be, in the soul-shattering corners of heartache and addiction and grief and terror and politics. There is love in places where it never belonged in the first place, and it is up to you to lead it home to safer waters.
I can promise you that if you see love in everything, then love will see everything in you, too. That is the very best of what I know to be true, and there is no other song to be sung.
Nina Motter, You Get What You Need
There is a house inside my brain. It sits on the sharp edge of something which is neither different nor the same as the house. And if you go inside the house, which sometimes when I was younger I would brave it, you could look out into that darkness and feel a strange sense that you were looking at yourself though you couldn’t really explain why. I was uncomfortable inside this place because I could not tell you much about it, but I liked it because it was mine. Conflicted, always, to balance the tangible vs. the intangible. What can we take away and what will give us shelter?
I’m most ashamed of the things which have no words. How often I find that is joy. Of course, it is a strange thing to say as someone who is constantly writing things down, constantly reading, constantly finding the precise image of something, and saying this is what it is to be me. There is a kind of counter curse to exposing so much of yourself that we were maybe never meant to know in the first place. Often when we know so much of each other, we tend really to see very little. I wanted to have the words for things because it terrifies me not to. To look out onto a dark edge and know that something is me, to hear that voice calling me in a direction and having to decide if I will go inside, if I will turn the light on. I’m scared, always, that if I can’t tell you what I mean then if I can’t show you this room of my joy, then it might not exist at all.
Nothing can reach you entirely. There are corners of your inner world that might never be touched by the roundness of words and art. Yet even what we can’t explain connects us to one another in a finite way. Everyone has a border to themselves they can feel but not reach. Everyone has a room in their house they cannot describe. You are alone, which paradoxically means you are not alone at the same time.
Chloé Williams, Chloé in Newsletter
a quiet love story
We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those we fold away.
Intimate the silence, dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper would be shrill.)
Yet whenever I turn
To your gray eyes over me,
It is as though I looked
For the first time at the sea.
Tennessee Williams | Sarah Teasdale
i did a thing!
each time you happen to me
I write you these words not knowing whether you will receive them, when you will receive them, and whether I will still be alive when you read them:
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart.
I watched their anxiety-how lonely it felt, how lonely it always is to witness someone turn their worry into the twitching of a finger, something muttered, a glance to the sky as if the sky might forgive each of us our wrongs.
When the pain came, I wondered why.
What isn’t broken just isn’t broken yet.
How what you love can kill you, even if you spend your whole life loving it. Even if you love it small. Even if you curl up in its palm.
Danielle Legros Georges | Cameron Awkward-Rich | Devin Kelly
My Solitude is Like the Grass
When I open the door, I smile and wave to people who only have eyes and who are infinitely joyful.
They once had mouths but now only have eyes. I want to leave the room but when I do, I am outside, and everyone else is inside.
So next time, I open the door and stay inside. But then everyone is outside.
Agnes said that solitude and freedom are the same.
My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience.
Sometimes people comment on how
beautiful my solitude is and sometimes my solitude replies with a heart.
Victoria Chang
Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.
I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear Through the upper right-hand corner of things…
Charles Wright
look at the sky: that is for you. look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: that is for you. and the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.
remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing.
stand up and face the east… it’s okay to be unsure…
Miranda July
these knives. this eclipse.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky the winter stars are sliding away; new stars appear as, later, small blades of grain will shine in the dark fields.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two computers swinging in it unwieldily at your side. I remember we broke into laughter when we saw each other. What was between us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.
That’s how I loved you.
WH Auden | Mary Oliver | Ada Limón
tiny hearts
the wind and how we never see it
delicate words like wings and tea
your thumb finally breaking the skin of an orange
the sudden magnitude of all feelings felt by the ocean
the fact that somewhere it is snowing on a beach
the way the stars show up every night without asking
breakfast for dinner
the distinct melodrama of airports
walking alone when the street lamps begin to turn on, one by one, just for you. the feeling that your legs could take you anywhere. into any moment. into any life.
the way people all over the world keep showing up and reading these letters
the unnecessary persistence of flowers in winter
the muffled sound of music, as if through a screen door or glass, heard floating from a window on a walk home
being alone on a train carriage where for the first time you realise that rilke was right: you really can change your life
how despite the seriousness of our aging bodies and all of our accumulated wisdom, the earth still becomes very funny after you spin around faster and faster
all the ways we try to refrain from harming one another every day
the waitress who calls you sweetheart as she sets down your tomato sandwich
comfortable words like warmth and trust. words like kindness and bread.
the persistence of life in flowers on tables
how tomorrow will be just like today, but different
the way flowers sleep too
how even the cruellest person you know has at least once listened to a shell
throwing spaghetti at a wall to see if it’s cooked
the uncircumscribable joy of finding a penny
standing elbow to elbow, cooking at the same stove. the casual sensuality of juggling, jostling, bumping, chopping, eating.
driving slowly when suddenly a cloud departs and the sun muscles through and ignites the hills and you realise that whatever this ache is won’t last.
that there was very likely one bird that decided to sing first
the intimate silence following a shared secret
the surprise of rain when it’s warm. even when it happens all the time.
all of those surprises that happen all of the time
the knowledge that you have absolutely no idea what you will love next.
all pictures are mine but these tiny hearts are extended from the everlasting beauty in form of a human, the gift that keeps on giving that is ars poetica.
which ones your favourite?
tiny little joy
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in all of the ways and through
it is late at night. you are by yourself, and all around you, you can hear the sounds of people moving
in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting their coins in the slots,
paying the price which is asked, which constantly changes.
no one knows why.
it’s the way you say things
it’s the way you say no, but yes that is it
it’s the way you don’t smile, and then you do
it’s the way you do life, in loving things you don’t, the way you say you love them even when you don’t,
but you do, you never falter
it’s the way you keep asking, while giving yourself the ultimate answer
why yes, most of all, it’s the way i… feel you: in all of the ways and through :))
we will never want from each other what we cannot have
Listen. It’s morning. Soon I’ll see your hand reach for my watch, the water will agitate in the kettle, but listen. Traffic. I want your dreams first. And to slide my leg beneath yours before the day opens.
Wait. We slept late. You’ll be moody, the phone will ring, someone wanting something. Let me put my hands in your hair. Who I was last night I would be again. This is how the future holds me, how depression wakes with us; my body shelters it. I know nothing lasts.
Tell me that we will never want from each other what we cannot have…
Robin Becker
maybe this is it.
maybe now you need a place faraway, a place where life doesn’t quite feel like your life, where you can sit you down, be more you in each passing minute, away from life, to read you, to read what life has to offer.
maybe you are thinking it, maybe you’re soak in it, maybe you’re stepping away, maybe you’re considering, maybe life isn’t that bad.
maybe, just maybe, i am thinking of you too.
If someone says are you happy? I’d say yes. If someone were to say, are you sad? I’d say yes. If someone were to say, are you hopeful? I’d say yes. If someone were to say are you hopeless? I’d say yes.
Aren’t you an infinite set of beings? I am.
Ram Dass
i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me
i notice the ones in pain shine more than the others.
it’s so they can be found,
make small steps. in this wild place there are signs of life everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock against my searching feet. small steps,
each one a hope exhaled into the trees.
please, let me enter. please, let me leave whole.
i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind
that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself
i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me
these are the hands of something ungreen.
make this final, watch as I create myself again every year, something that blooms over and over again.
mistake me into a girl enough and i will become myself green, something with cells rooting out of me, something that will last well after your voice leaves you, well after my voice dissipates into
the sun.
to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it.
then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, i will take you i will love you, again.
Linda Gregg | Ashley M. Jones | Lucille Clifton | Aeon Ginsberg | Ellen Bass | Arundhati Roy
Find a way to love your way forward. Find a way to show up and be gentle. And when that doesn’t work, when you’re too tired… too ill and too indifferent, and you’re surrounded by people who just don’t seem to care about you or your needs at all? Remind yourself that most people grew up on pirate ships, on desert islands, in the trenches of a brutal war.
Most people learned to swing a long sword and sail away with the wind and spear fish and fire a rifle before they learned to sit and cry and breathe and tell the truth.
Most people never learned to sit and cry and tell the truth.
Have mercy on them. Notice their pain. Honor their big hearts. Relish your body’s endless capacity for love.
binge thinking you
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i regret to inform you, i am here
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows…
…only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for…
Naomi Shihab Nye
we are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.
—Kate Murphy
I remind myself that language isn’t my job. Writing a poem isn’t my job. My job is the human job of waiting and listening, and language is just what poets use—like wind chimes—to catch the sound of the larger, more essential thing.
—Jenny George
I’m sorry, could you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.
To the cashier
To the receptionist
To the insistent man asking directions on the street
I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?
At the business meeting
In the writing workshop
On the phone to make a doctor’s appointment
I m-sorry-Im-sorry-Im-so-sorry-Im-hard-for-the-hearing
Repeat.
Repeat.
Hello, my name is Sorry To full rooms of strangers
I’m hard to hear
I vomit apologies everywhere
They fly on bat wings
towards whatever sound beckons
Im sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry
and repeating
and not hearing
Dear (again)
I regret to inform you
i am
here
Camisha L. Jones
Almost children, we lay asleep in love listening to the
rain.
We didn’t ask to be born.
Franz Wright
the more loving one
you reap what you sow, do you even know
no loves on earth, in any form, of any kind, is threatening. you give. and that’s it. wanting in return is not love. wanting all the more is assault. forcing is assault.
i am no one’s i owe nothing i’m allowed to change my mind
the more you show me, the more i see
but no love is in vain. the more you know, the braver you are
listen to me, and the love that is sincere you’ll know and see
the deeper you know people, the more your heart swells, the more there is to reach out, to hold them close
the more you are, the more there is for others, to shine a light, to look them in the eye. no love is ever demanding.
in their silence, you find sadness, you hear their plea, you find reasons to let go
there are thorns in flattery, something you won’t feel right away
in a slight jibe, you learn much about you and the other person, it’s a gift
what is a gut feeling if not unwilling, an excuse not to breaking bread, give it away, give it anyway
love anyway… be the more loving one. you will be fine.
there is no safety in love. there is no guarantee that anything we touch won’t either leave a mark or take one—and anything worthwhile will almost always do both. to love at all is to step off the curb, to wander into the crosswalk with your eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance, hoping the light just stays green long enough.
let the more loving one be me: a quiet directive, and perhaps also an unpopular one in our current age—an understanding that love is not an act of possession but rather one of play. the game? to expand the boundaries of one’s goodness in the face of absolute and unequivocal loss. it’s hopeless, after all. so just how far can you go?
there is a certain freedom to being the more loving one. to love without ego, without an instinct for self-preservation, is to abandon oneself to something luminous and terrifying, as a bird sleeps unprotected in order to dream of music.
We have to-morrow
Bright before us
Like a flame
Yesterday, a night-gone thing
A sun-down name
And dawn to-day
Broad arch above the road we came,
We march.
to those who never force themselves onto me: thank you.
have a very happy new year!
falling, ending in slow motion
we live on a hillside close to water
we eat in darkness
we sleep in the coldest part of the house
we love in silence
we keep our poetry locked in a glass cabinet
some nights we stay up passing it back and forth between us
drinking deep
a web of snow engulfed me then i reached to love them all and i squeezed them and they became a spring rain and i stood perfectly still and was a flower
It’s too easy to fall in love here. It’s too easy to see the end coming, to miss the frogs in November, to miss the cicadas in December, to wonder what you did wrong, to hide your heart. It’s too hard to forget. These trees won’t let you. …every remark a confession, every sigh a plea, heart like a drumbeat, impossible to ignore, always singing in your honor, always seeing the end coming, falling in slow motion—
C. D. Wright | Nikki Giovanni | Heather Havrilesky
i am always looking away, or again
if I could ruin my feathers in flight before the sun;
do you think that I would remain in this room, reciting poems to you, and making outrageous dreams
with the smallest movements of your mouth?
I am writing to you all the time, I am writing
with both hands, day and night.
I’m full of longing and can’t move, enthralled in the garden.
All my hard little tears, future selves who haven’t grown. Bedclothes swell on the line while around me giant sunflowers burn through their masks of radiant desire.
I’m thinking now of how far it always seems there is to go.
Maybe it is too easy that I speak so often
of late last light on a December day, of that stubborn grass that somehow still remains green behind the broken chain link fence on the corner.
show me the way to believe that what matters in this world has already happened
and will go on happening forever.
Leonard Cohen | Franz Wright | Jenny George | Jim Moore
You May Be The Light
Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead
I’m trying to pretend that winter isn’t real
There was the wind and the ocean and in it there were whales
that lowed in the darkness like the onset of collapse.
There was this dark will
and what could I say but my name and what hurt?
How Shall I Tell You
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lights above the sea
The sky’s white with November’s teeth, and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree, a cargo train speeding through, and there, that’s me, standing in the wintering grass watching the dog suffer the cold leaves.
I’m not large from this distance, just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
How my own body, empty, clean of secrets, knows how to carry her, knows we were all meant for something.
to look down on my own body and know that falling would mean dying not just once but many times
to fall for a million years like a flute falls, musically, played by the air it is passing through
and to land with no mind, but with a heart that was breaking
#leonardospoetry
when i began to write, it was out of fear. i thought i might forget, or pretend to forget, or pretend to pretend,
or grow up
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the
sea—
A poem should not mean
But be
lightheaded
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons equals the collective weight of every animal on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief—just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
We, too, are getting ready
To become a poem.
lighthearted
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perhaps it never happened at all
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what we are and something beyond
i have cried for love and i have cried for pain. i have cried for remembering and i have cried for forgetting. i have cried for roses and i have cried for rain. i have cried for kisses and i have cried for films and i have even cried for tears themselves. … i’ve cried for mistakes– for my own and for others’. i’ve cried for happiness. i’ve cried at the sight of a baby turtledove.
my tears emerge without warning. and when they leave me, they are never gone: my tears after passing don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled out by the root. when they fade, something of them remains— something harder, more persistent; call it a reminder, call it recollection— like a small seed that might bud again if rain falls.
tears are an extension of that inside of us which seeks to go beyond ourselves. they have this in common with art, with love, with language, and with touch.
we are born, we love, we speak, we cry out, we keep or cannot keep what is given to us, we hold on to what we can— and occasionally we fail—
we are attentive, we are negligent, we are beloved and we are so very alone. things happen and we are changed by them, as we are by each other. sometimes, these things are beautiful and immediate. at other times, these things that happen are not fair, and take time to reveal their importance. always: the moon rises, always: the sun follows, always: we continue to become what we are: and always something beyond our immediate imaginings.
at the end when with our eyes and hands open, both more and less alive, we walk through that final terrible door, we will likely ask: was this enough?
the meaning of it all may very well be to cry.
schrödinger’s cat
closure
—much presence, aliveness, …comes from not seeking it in everything, or trying to force everything into its shape before it even forms —but from carving out enough space to simply allow it to enter when it arrives.
I suppose what I’m trying to offer here, both to myself and to you, is this:
Permission to trust what is happening when you can’t seem to find the words.
Permission to take off your meaning-making hat and simply soften into the moment.
Permission to allow your life to be yours first, to be for you first.
Permission to serve your own aliveness before offering it up to others.
Permission to stay with the unknowable instead of trying to know.
Permission to live out all your private experiences, just for you.
Permission to keep your most sacred moments and thoughts sacred.
Permission to linger in the questions longer than you’re comfortable.
Permission to be carried by the surprise of your own unfolding.
clumsy
I will wait and wait and wait, feeling overwhelmed, but keeping hope grit between my teeth.
It’s as if those last few cold nights hold a stronger gravity than the rest of the year. The trees are without their waving welcome.
The snowbanks shrug in their sloping indifference. Nothing outside wants to be touched.
And when I can’t go roll around in the dirt or sleep under the quiet chirp of stars or throw my naked body into chilled lake waves or hike until my breath thins in the pink happy of my lungs,
all my thinking folds in on itself.
tapeworm
everything i put inside of myself somehow
ends up
inside
of you
instead
& so you grow
& i
shrink
& don’t notice
until
my best
friend
draws
me
from
the side just by
running
a fine-tipped pen down a sheet of white paper.
you walk into a house & swallow all of the
furniture.
i fell
in love
with you at parties.
when you laughed
at my jokes, the sound lived
inside of me
for weeks.
i can’t tell the
difference between
my
thoughts & your voice.
my intestines & you.
how is it possible that you are both my joy
& the taker of it?
i told you that when i’m sad
i do not eat.
& i let the forks turn to rust.
you came to the door with sinking
eyes & a dry tongue
& begged me to
put something
inside
of myself to make
you fat
again,
you said,
send me a picture of every meal & another of your clean plate.
i said,
okay okay okay i will.
& so i boiled some
spinach
& snapped a photo, then
slid it
into
the dog’s bowl,
walked
to your
apartment & left the bare dish
at
your
feet.
Wherever You Are is Here
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
to live in this world—to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
You Can Have August, and Abundantly So
You can’t have it all…
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green.
—If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so.
You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious—
You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together—
And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will—
—it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this.
