good bones - maggie smith

[luckyzukky]

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

(maggie smith)
(source)

sunrise - louise glück

[luckyzukky]

This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills,
the thyme and rosemary that grew there,
crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks
and, lower down, where there was real dirt,
competing with other things, blueberries and currants,
the small shrubby trees the bees love—
Whatever we ate smelled of the hills,
even when there was almost nothing.
Or maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.

( Read more... )

(louise glück)
(source)

utopia - louise glück

[luckyzukky]

When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I
know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the
woman, because it is the right time. A train approached the station; clouds
of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney. How terrified I am, the child
thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother. Her hair
has been tightly braided to withstand the journey. Then, without a word,
she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language
like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry.

(louise glück)
(source)

crossroads - louise glück

[luckyzukky]

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

(louise glück)
(source)

excerpt from "averno" - louise glück

[luckyzukky]

You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.

(louise glück)
(source, chapter "averno")

the imprint - anna de noailles (tl. walter wykes)

[luckyzukky]

I will cling so stubbornly to life,
I will clutch it so fiercely
That before the sweetness of this day fades
I will warm it forever with my touch.

The endless sea which touches all countries
Will carry on its fickle waves
The taste of my pain, bitter and salty,
And tossing like a boat.

I will leave in the hills a bit of myself--
The heat of my eyes which saw them bloom;
And cicadas, nesting on thorny branches,
Will sing out the shrill cry of my desire.

In fresh spring fields infant buds
And soft grass escaping from the earth
Will feel, like wings that flutter and pulse,
The shadow of my hands which stroked them once.

Nature, my joy in life and my domain,
Will breathe my lasting essence into the air,
And upon the gloom of human suffering
I will imprint the shape of my distinctive heart.

(anna de noailles)
(walter wykes)
(source)

quote from "dazzled, precise" - anna de noailles (tl. norman r. shapiro)

[luckyzukky]

My kind of rebirth tasted like blood.

(anna de noailles)
(norman r. shapiro)
(source)

quote from "the unabridged journals of sylvia plath" - sylvia plath

[luckyzukky]

There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.

(sylvia plath)
(source

ouija - sylvia plath

[luckyzukky]

It is a chilly god, a god of shades,
Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.
At the window, those unborn, those undone
Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,
An envious phosphorescence in their wings.
Vermilions, bronzes, colors of the sun
In the coal fire will not wholly console them.
Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark
For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim.
The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.
The old god dribbles, in return, his words.

( Read more... )

(sylvia plath)
(source)

fuck fear. love anyway - bassey ikpi

[luckyzukky]

The goal is to be unafraid when you love.
To turn your shoulder towards the winds and push on.
To be relentless in your pursuit of it.
To be fearless and unafraid.

We are so bold in anger and confrontation and so scared and meek in love.
Quick to tell someone off or to give them a piece of your mind.
Slow to place your heart in their hands and say, “Take care of this.”
Fear is a trigger.
I wish love was a trigger.
I wish it was what made me tremble and took my breath and made me dizzy.
I want to live in the cliché.
I want to exist in the love song.
Let me be mountain high and river deep. Not tabletop and puddle afraid.

( Read more... )

(bassey ikpi)
(source)

excerpt from "how to be a good patient" - natalie dougall

[luckyzukky]

Google “Am I dying?” You’re pretty sure you’re dying. But if you were dying, wouldn’t other people notice?

Take all the medications prescribed, even when they make everything much, much worse. Call the doctor, call the doctor, call the doctor. Leave a message, leave a message, leave a message.

Be good. Be so good. Deep inside you believe that if you are good, maybe this pain and humiliation will somehow lift, pull away from you and simply disappear as easily as it came.

When you’re finally called back after two weeks of chasing the doctor, be jovial and grateful and fast, he’s got a lot of people to call back. When you tell him the medications are no good, he gives you permission to quit but has nothing else for you. “Let’s hope you get pregnant soon, you might go into remission then.”

You know you wrote Infertility in your list of issues in that careful blue pen. You wrote it over and over and over again. But okay, let’s hope. It’s all you’ve got.

(natalie dougall)
(source)

quote from "collected essays" - james baldwin

[luckyzukky]

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

(james baldwin)
(source)

salvage - hedgie choi

[luckyzukky]

I have seen deer split open on the road and thought

that's exactly what
those
soft and gentle
fuckers

deserve.

Some things happened to me in my formative years that I don't want to

 ‎ tell you about

but some things happened to you too.

(hedgie choi)
(source)

in my natural habitat - hedgie choi

[luckyzukky]

It did occur to me, yes
that babyhood is a good time
to demand boundless love

not because you are helpless
but because you are harmless.

This was at Duval and 38th right after someone honked at me because the

 ‎ ‎light was green

and had been for some time.

I was on my bike, trying to grow back into something
I had grown out of, like a hermit crab rewound.

Did you know those little guys get in a line according to size so they can

 ‎ ‎move into a shell that fits in quick succession and minimize the time

 ‎ ‎they are exposed and homeless? I watched a video of this narrated by

 ‎ ‎David Attenborough—they form an orderly queue for the exchange.

Remarkable.

But in this video
one latecomer
muscles his way in
and steals the last crab’s shell.

Remarkable.
I mean the hate I feel.

Do you know what color the light has been
in my life, generally?

You know already that I did not
really turn around and say this
to the teenager in the car.

You do not need to be told how little happened.

(hedgie choi)
(source)

the civil war - anne sexton

[luckyzukky]

I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
I will put Him together again
with the patience of a chess player.

How many pieces?

It feels like thousands,
God dressed up like a whore
in a slime of green algae.
God dressed up like an old man
staggering out of His shoes.
God dressed up like a child,
all naked,
even without skin,
soft as an avocado when you peel it.
And others, others, others.

But I will conquer them all
and build a whole nation of God
in me - but united,
build a new soul,
dress it with skin
and then put on my shirt
and sing an anthem,
a song of myself.

(anne sexton)
(source)

lake-loop - natalie diaz

[luckyzukky]

           , because there was yet no lake

( Read more... )

(natalie diaz)
(source)