April. So Long.
Tag: poetry
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
Love, I Don’t Love You Just Yet
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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
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. ©️2025 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 Can’t Grow a New Heart
these stories, they come to me in dreams the first time I fell asleep since they told me you’ve fallen into flatline
i dream you
sometimes in colours, green and oranges, purples and blues, and not bleak nor dark,
we are not in the shadows
in these dreams, our children they’re born. they’re not sucked to death, they’re not stillborn nor bled away
they live and we give
names to their innocent loving faces
the eldest has my eyes, her brother has your smile
in these dreams we’re not bitter
we’re not numb from pain
in these dreams you are standing tall
little daughter dances on your devoted steadfast feet
her brother clung to your arms, his head rests on your secure and sturdy shoulder.
he’s falling into another dream.
in these dreams, I dance with you under the chuppah and you recite a long vow, a song we used to hum before we went to sleep about lovers lost and again, found.
on years that are wiser,
on Letters to Lovers Lost
i’ve done grieving. i have moved on. thank you for the journey.
available, again, with new cover.
picture modified from Courtney Love’s diary/weheartit.com
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
ohh
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what i love is how it stayed
the only light outside
r.i.p.
“Whenever I leave this world, whether it’s 60 years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.”
Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be
and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this:
Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain
I will keep it safe.
I will keep it safe.
To every day you could not get out of bed. To the bulls eye of your wrist To anyone who has ever wanted to die. I have been told, sometimes,
the most healing thing to do-
Is remind ourselves over and over and over: “Other people feel this too.”
The tomorrow that is coming,
gone
And it has not gotten better When you are half finished writing that letter to your mother that says
“I swear to God I tried But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back”
There is no bruise like the bruise of loneliness kicks into the spine
So let me tell you I know there are days it looks like the whole world is dancing in the streets when you break down like the doors of the looted buildings
You are not alone
these words are all from the lovely tender and magnificent Andrea Gibson, who has passed today. so long, Andrea…
Posthumous Post Script
very much little else but you
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
Sunday Pastische
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
intimacy
In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things lean on each other, how the bees work, the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand I love you with what in me is unfinished.
I love you with what in me is still changing, what has no head or arms or legs, what has not found its body.
You are making breakfast in every dream that I have of you.
You are in the kitchen, your soft middle pressed up against the cold marble countertops like a vision too beautiful for the magazines, sprinkling dark chocolate chips over pancakes.
I think for a brief second that
I am dreaming inside of my dream, that I had to make you up twice, just to get it right.
You, brushing your dark hair out of your face, smearing batter across your cheeks.
You have come and made my dreams smaller, narrower. Filled them with sugar and your body humming in the same room as mine.
I dream, now, of a normal life with you.
A life where breakfast lasts until the sun goes down, until I have finished gazing at you from across the table,
flour dried to your forehead like a kiss.
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
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
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?
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
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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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.
binge thinking
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.
longer and longer still
When I didn’t know how to live I became my grandmother: opening windows in the morning early enough to see the light sifting between the curtains, I swept the floor with a bamboo broomstick and made breakfast.
And in my head came her raspy voice and her soft voice and her quiet voice; which rarely laughed but was always delighted with living and eighty years of reticent habits cultivated by her small hands.
She had not always been loved, so she knew all about love.
And on days which were longer and longer still, on returning home to an empty apartment in that spectacular city—her voice emanated like bells.
You must be hungry, she said, looking over at what I was cooking. And I laid my head in the lap of her voice, nodding. I am, I am.
how much pain should we invite
How much pain
should we knowingly invite—the gallery says all, and all at once.
Otherwise, why paint or write if not for ends hidden in plain sight?
I watch you disappear into the next room knowing, one day, this room will be my life.
i am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
i am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive.
i want my own will, and i want simply to be with my will—and in the silent —when something is coming near,
i want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
i want to be a mirror for your whole body, and i never want to be blind, or to be too old to hold up your heavy and swaying picture. i want to unfold.
i don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where i am folded, there i am a lie.
and i want my grasp of things true before you. i want to describe myself like a painting that i looked at closely for a long time,
like a saying that i finally understood —like a ship that took me safely through the wildest storm of all.
this unfolding does not mean there’ll be poetry
i think we have, on our worst days,
wounded each other, on our best days, spent
too much time searching
but this unfolding, this becoming, does not
always mean
there’ll be poetry