30 days of prompts: day 25
& quotations, tweets, etc.
Here’s what I have for you today:
The prompt
What I’m reading
Quotations
Many tweets—open this email in a new window if you want to read them all
Prompt: Day 25
Write an occasional poem.
An occasional poem is:
An occasional poem is a poem written to document or provide commentary on an event. (x)
Here are some occasions your poem might respond to:
Anniversary
New season
Birthdays
Black History Month
Christmas
Funeral
Wedding
Father’s Day
New Year’s
Etc.
I finished rereading
The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and maintain that it’s really, really good.
Here are some quotations:
…Harp of her pelvic bone a mouth
Falling upon it like corn cut down
In a field I was forbidden
To walk through.
-Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Her mouth finds the woman’s
Thigh, that darkness, and we are all moaning
In the pasture.
-Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Horror is the company
you keep when shades are drawn.
-Gabrielle Calvocoressi
& some more quotations:
The house is again a bouquet of June bugs / and cement-split nectarines.
-Gustavo Hernandez
perhaps this is how / America prefers me: / body bursting mid / -air, blood staining horizon.
-George Abraham
a lifeguard pulls my 4-year not-corpse from / the pool floor at my first swim lesson: / a second baptism.
-George Abraham
Every time i open / my mouth: a chorus / of blood. // i think of it as history.
-George Abraham
what the textbooks fail to mention:
i was whole once.
[…]
i was not always crumbled
fortress & concrete
partition. once, the bodies
in me could sing
without screaming—
-George Abraham
Tell me my body is a thing you pulled from a lake.
Or tell me my body is the lake itself—
all vast darkness—
-George Abraham
I’m trying to become the animal you made of me.
-Philip Schaefer
Sometimes
it’s necessary for […] people
to dissolve. Sometimes
we shed our names.
-Philip Schaefer
This is hardly the earth. This is
my breath unraveling. My teeth.
-Philip Schaefer
Don’t you know, by now,
the sound and shape of grief?
-Joyce Chong
We disappear into prayers & everything unholy.
-Tanya Singh
Tonight tell me something good. Tell me
Someone somewhere fell in love & still lived.
-Tanya Singh
The line between love and violence is vulnerability. Let me explain: a dotted line—a constellatory line. On moonless nights, a dark without oversight, I labor at connecting. Constellating, the work of love. Like the off-center heart reaching with pulse toward each light-filled lung.
The body’s always longing, by which I mean literally making itself long in its want.
-Katherine Indermaur
loss is a syntax / that never takes long to learn.
-Joyce Chong
i am / more scream than i am anything else
-Luis Neer
My heart cracked lightning. It blew hail. Branches snapped.
-Megan Giddings
I imagine hell as a place belowground
where this agony currently contained
in my skull spreads to the rest of me
and there is no death to end it
-M. Stone
i want to be something better than immortal, so i bite summer down to the bone and it still smiles with the same sweetness. maybe i could slaughter every season in my sleep.
-Quinn Lui
to be a girl means // to dress yourself as a corpse each day / in preparation.
-Quinn Lui
i’m hoping // all that seafoam-white // doesn’t go to waste | hoping
someone’s fool enough // to shipwreck on that mouth //
-Quinn Lui
Tweets:
In conclusion:
As always, I hope you’ll consider buying some books or art or zines or shirts or giving me attention on Instagram. No pressure, though.
See you tomorrow!
-DB