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Fuchsia, Mahtem Shiferraw

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LUCILLE CLIFTON

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It seems silly to worry about the arbitrary moment some person long dead declared to be the end of one year at the beginning of another, as if our attempts to divide time into meaningful chunks actually mean anything. People wait for the countdown to tell them that it's okay to believe in themselves again. They end each year with failure, but hope that when the clock strikes twelve, they can begin the new year with a clean slate. They tell themselves that this is the year things will happen, never realizing that things are always happening; they're just happening without them.

we are the ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

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Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.

Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

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Nothing matters // Everything's important

Mother Mother, Infinitesimal // Iain S. Thomas, How To Be Happy: Not a Self-Help Book. Seriously // Carl Sagan, Cosmos // ND Stevenson, The Fire Never Goes Out // @ falseknees on Instagram // Will Wood and the Tapeworms, -ish // @ lostinwildspace on Instagram, with “Evening of Ushibori” by Kawase Hasui in the background // Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are The Ants

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James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

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this poem is about being nonbinary.

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To The Substitute Art Teacher - Jordan Bolton

Pre-order my new book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

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Like Honey, Parentheses Journal (2022)

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Andrea Gibson, "DEPRESSION [VERB]", Lord of the Butterflies

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Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

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In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

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Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus, originally published: 1977

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@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

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witchgrass, louise glück

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Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

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It was April and she was the saddest thing under the sun.

Khush Bakht via wordedarchive