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grief [matthew dickman]

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla you must count yourself lucky. You must offer her what’s left of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish you must put aside, and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed, her eyes moving from the clock to the television and back again. I am not afraid. She has been here before and now I can recognize her gait as she approaches the house. Some nights, when I know she’s coming, I unlock the door, lie down on my back, and count her steps from the street to the porch. Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper, tells me to write down everyone I have ever known, and we separate them between the living and the dead so she can pick each name at random. I play her favorite Willie Nelson album because she misses Texas but I don’t ask why. She hums a little, the way my brother does when he gardens. We sit for an hour while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been, crying in the checkout line, refusing to eat, refusing to shower, all the smoking and all the drinking. Eventually she puts one of her heavy purple arms around me, leans her head against mine, and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic. So I tell her, things are feeling romantic. She pulls another name, this time from the dead, and turns to me in that way that parents do so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something. Romantic? she says, reading the name out loud, slowly, so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel wrapping around the bones like new muscle, the sound of that person’s body and how reckless it is, how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

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I meant skies all empty aching blue. I meant years. I meant all of them with you.

Kate Clancy, from “Perhaps Patagonia” (via thebluesthour)

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Lola Ridge, from To The Many; The Collected Poems of L. R.; “I Am Shining,”

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“my heart is a limping deer.”

— Hafizah Geter, from ‘the unrequited, its aftermath’, in Drunken Boat

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“You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. Only / the sun has come this close, only the sun.”

— Shauna Barbosa, from “GPS,” Cape Verdean Blues

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Gustav Vigeland, Coitus, 1898

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“You do not know / How little I loved / Before I loved you.”

— Joan Naviyuk Kane, from “Love Poem,” Hyperboreal

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Mark McMorris

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“To sleep in one another’s arms, and dream of waves, flowers, clouds, woods,”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, from The Collected Poems of P. S; “Epipsychidion,”

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“When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.”

 -  Mishima Yukio, 愛の渇き (Thirst for Love)

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Here in this great autumnal forest where I walk barefoot there are paths on which we might have walked together

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Lou Salomé witten c. August 1904

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Forugh Farrokhzad, tr. by Sholeh Wolpé, from “On Loving”, Sin: Selected Poems

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“You see the sun, and for the first time in years, you can feel it, warm on your skin, hot on the back of your neck. For the first time in years, you are unarmed.”

— Bianca Sparacino, For The Girls With Broken Hearts, Don’t Be Afraid To Love Again

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unknown / nicola samori / richard siken

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The river is low            almost calm We sip peach cider share nachos on a patio ringed with crocuses wave to the waning moon There’s a metaphor here, too Something about sweetness About how things move in circles About coming back to life again                       again

— Allison Armstrong, from “Lebreton Flats Spring Day,” published in L’Éphémère Review

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100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets