how to tell a story - shira erlichman

[luckyzukky]

There is a way of telling stories. A red pen. A teacher to move it.
Instead you have hands, and a Light inside you, and Bones.
Instead you have ideas, which ricochet, and an anger that won’t sit still,
and dogs from outside which come to die in the quiet spots inside of you.
And, deliberately, you have noise.
You have rape, and cities, the noise of the dumb, and of the very rape of the
earth, an ache, a strangeness like swallowing feathers, a bitterness, you have.
There is a way of telling stories. They tell you it is not like this.

So you remove your arms, that way no hands can find anything.
You reject the light to please the darkness.
You and I, we become just bones, moving with the stiffness of the dead, caught
in the riot of the rotting, and producing similar sounds.

A page opens before you like a new day
and this is where you find your story.
The earth sings with a thousand ways to tell it.
Lose your tongue.
Don’t be confused by shadow, and when you hit water, tread.
Find God, ask questions, don’t leave till you’ve tasted the tea.
You don’t need to multiply. Never divide.
Carry the one on your back if you have to.
When you meet the devil, don’t spit at him, but don’t make love to him either.
When you meet me, take my blooming, bloody palm.
You’ll know where to find me, I’ll be in every page held by greasy fingers.
I will be the bread that sustains you. If you remember your hunger,

I will remember you.
And when they tell you life is not like this, life is never like this,
life will never be like this, insist that the sun
has always found a time and a place, the moon too knows when and where to enter,
and you too have your stories,
and you too have your place.

(shira erlichman)
(source)

the piano speaks - shira erlichman

[luckyzukky]

( content warning: inpatient psychiatric treatment and all that entails )

(shira erlichman)
(source)

the unfinished suicides of my high school sweetheart - shira erlichman

[luckyzukky]

( content warnings: suicidality, semi-explicit teenage sexuality )

(shira erlichman)
(source)

why we don’t have children - anthony frame

[luckyzukky]

( content warnings: sex/sexuality, murder etc imagery )

(anthony frame)
(source)

There Will Come Soft Rains - sara teasdale

[luckyzukky]

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

(sara teasdale)
(source)

like a small café, that’s love - mahmoud darwish

[luckyzukky]

Like a small café on the street of strangers—
that’s love… its doors open to all.
Like a café that expands and
contracts with the weather:
if it pours with rain its customers increase,
if the weather’s fine, they are few and weary…
I am here, stranger, sitting in the corner.
(What color are your eyes? What is your name?
How shall I call to you as you pass by,
as I sit waiting for you?)
A small café, that’s love.
I order two glasses of wine
and drink to my health and yours.
I am carrying two caps
and an umbrella. It is raining now.
It is raining more than ever,
and you do not come in.
I say to myself at last: Perhaps she who I was waiting for
was waiting for me, or was waiting for some other man,
or was waiting for us, and did not find him/me.
She would say: Here I am waiting for you.
(What color are your eyes? What is your name?
What kind of wine do you prefer? How shall I call to you when
you pass by?)
A small café, that’s love…

(mahmoud darwish, tl. mohammad shaheen)
(source)

passage - victoria chang

[luckyzukky]

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

(victoria chang)
(source)

jealousy - hera lindsay bird

[luckyzukky]

Anytime someone I'm dating mentions someone they used to love
in a semi-nostalgic or non-cynical way
I immediately want to drive my car head-first into a swamp full of battery acid
ruining Christmas for everyone!!!
it’s so unreasonable to be afraid
of so many sad and distant women
who have escaped into the future
only occasionally looking back through their naturally thick eyelashes
when I think about the possibility
the person I’m currently with has ever been remotely romantically interested
in another person ever
I felt a great self-antagonism
for being the kind of woman who came afterwards
like a bad sequel with a higher budget

​ O I feel sorry for the people I love and where it is I am taking them
because I don’t think I’m good enough
I think it’s okay to admit the people you love are better than you
I wouldn’t date anyone who wasn’t
imagine dating someone worse than yourself on purpose
that’s the kind of fucked up thing only everyone I’ve ever loved would do

(hera lindsay bird)
(source)

I want to get high my whole life with you - hera lindsay bird

[luckyzukky]

i feel it in my leather hotpant pockets

i feel it in my anime wind blowing through an alpine tennis resort overcome with wildflowers

i feel it in my ironic valley girl hairflip

I feel it in my admittedly limited knowledge of the Roman mythologies

i feel it in my biopic about a corrupt alcoholic educational resource salesman advertising increasingly less and less educational resources

i want to get high my whole life with you

i feel it in my anime wind blowing through an alpine tennis resort overcome with wildflowers AGAIN, and the poem isn’t even halfway over yet

so what if my blood is the wind

so what if I love you so much I am becoming stupid

my heart melting like red candles on Satan’s birthday cake

( Read more... )

(hera lindsay bird)
(source)

imaginary conversation - linda pastan

[luckyzukky]

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

(linda pastan)
(source)

sleeping in the forest - mary oliver

[luckyzukky]

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

(mary oliver)
(source)

hieroglyphs - tim kendall

[luckyzukky]

I dream you, and you come to me
intact, in focus, indiscreet, mouthing
the sweetest lies as if we cared.

As if, in fact, we might begin again
with needle-tracks and scratches down your arms
that might have told in drunken hieroglyphs

how heavy-shouldered I pick my way
through a night of empty forecourts,
back to the etceteras of passion:

the obligatory pathos of discarded shoes,
the glass of water juddering by the bed,
the face my heavenly eyes avoid.

(tim kendall)
(source)