round-up: 6/13
a quickie
Happy Monday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
I must be / a violet thorn of fire.
-Traci Brimhall
Morning’s mad tongue, wind-stunned,
as fine as your fine thigh resting against
mine, this long river rarely lost to the lust
of water.
-Carrie Jerrell, “Love Poem Made in a Dry Riverbed”
You skin the surface of wakefulness to find
my willing mouth, and what follows
feels something like sun warming the land,
something like prescience and thunder.
-Carrie Jerrell, “Love Poem Made in a Dry Riverbed”
I am trying not to think about what it means to be
a body, to not know it like others—strangers—
know it. To be anything other than the space that fills
the day.
-Kanika Lawton
this body / predictable in its hunger / my body is my body even when it fails me
-Kanika Lawton
and the house is again a bouquet of June bugs
and cement-split nectarines.
-Gustavo Hernandez
She’s weaving in the brown fluttering
of the frenzied sparrows and the overflowing
mouth of summer.
-Gustavo Hernandez
Weeks
have passed since we last saw each other,
and maybe this soft splintering is what comes
after grief allows us some form
of breath.
-Gustavo Hernandez
I’m looking only for pleasure.
-Victoria McArtor
Everything’s adolescence / & androgyny.
-Victoria McArtor
I have always wanted to write a poem in which lavender / rhymes with vendor or scavenger but mostly cadaver
-Leah Nielsen
i touched the hand of a boy i know and i felt a long forgotten transfer of energy
-Zach Ozma
i touched a boy’s rough hand and felt a transfer of energy,
like recognition between two data points, or, a spark, or, two plants feeding off of one another when the sun and dirt and moisture are not enough.
-Zach Ozma
sometimes it is hard to explain things in words that my mother will understand because i can only explain them to myself in a densely referential way. a bodily notion like a PALIMPSEST or a ROCK FORMATION.
-Zach Ozma
to cover the SKIN of my GIRLHOOD in nasturtium leaves until we are polkadotted and cool and green
-Zach Ozma
I am forever living between Aprils.
-Hala Alyan
Everybody loves the poem.
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee.
It’s done nothing for Palestine.
-Hala Alyan
There is nothing more terrible / than waiting for the terrible.
-Hala Alyan
Was the grief worth the poem? No.
-Hala Alyan
Your lip an abstraction of iris.
-Traci Brimhall
You know / I always need to save something, to control it.
-Traci Brimhall
But look at me now, my heat signature a whole
bouquet of howling, straddling scarves of smoke.
-Traci Brimhall
My ribs, sets of parentheses. My heart,
an aside, an apple ready for the twist.
-Traci Brimhall
I had weight back there. Had substance
& sinew, damage you could see
by looking between your hands & hearing
blood.
-Ocean Vuong
I made a killing
in language & was surrounded
by ghosts.
-Ocean Vuong
Tonight, the splinter I let live in my thumb finally worked
its way out of my flesh, the wound larger than the weapon.
-Traci Brimhall
i think of sex when i unveil what i’ve made like this.
i think of sex because i am always thinking of sex.
-Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Tweets:
Thanks for reading—
-Despy Boutris