plexurade

[plexurade]

A tree frog croaks from its harddark hole in the otherwise empty change slot of a vending machine.

Sarah McCartt-Jackson, Borrow

[plexurade]

So many years,  so many hungry years after.  Thank you for the apricots in the mail, thank you more for appearing at my door with so little time left: no going back to field our regrets. Old as we are, you are here and now, why not a meadow and a clearing?

Ira Sadoff, Thank You

[plexurade]

Some people don’t even want to drink, aren’t tempted by the pools of liquor all around them. This seems a selfishness. God loves the hungry more than the full.

Kaveh Akbar, Portrait of the Alcoholic with Doubt and Kingfisher, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

[plexurade]

Because the bird flew before             there was a word             for flight

                                     years from now                                      there will be a name                         for what you and I are doing. - Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Cenzontle

[plexurade]

The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger.

Fanny Howe,  The Needle's Eye: Passing Through Youth

[plexurade]

it’s a myth that love lives in the heart it lives in the throat we push it out when we speak when we gasp we take a little for ourselves

Kaveh Akbar, Heritage, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

[plexurade]

In the first language, the word for bridge translates to death by water. The iron law of congestion: traffic expands to flood any available space. Keep a soul open and it’s bound to fill up with scum. It’s all I can do to quiver in and out of my jeans each day, to keep my fingers out of the wrong mouths.

Kaveh Akbar, Wake Me Up When it’s My Birthday, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

[plexurade]

I’ve given this coldness many names thinking if it had a name it would have a solution thinking if I called a wolf a wolf I might dull its fangs I carried the coldness like a diamond for years holding it close near as blood until one day I woke and it was fully inside me both of us ruined and unrecognizable two coins on a train track the train crushed into one

Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf(Inpatient), Calling a Wolf a Wolf

[plexurade]

And, look, I am saying that I have wanted to forget the day and run into whatever allowed me to do so at night. I’m saying that I want to be in love, but sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to do the work of balancing what that means in what hour of whatever darkness I’m sitting in. And across the theater in Seattle, I lock eyes with someone for what was mere seconds but feels like an entire small lifetime, and I wonder what it must be like to trust a stranger with your undoing in the way that The Weeknd asks us to. What it must be like to feel briefly full without considering if any emptiness might follow.

Hanif Abdurraqib, The Weeknd and The Future Of Loveless Sex, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

[plexurade]

It feels, in tone and tension, like coming home for a summer after your first year of college, having tasted another existence and wanting more, but instead sleeping in your childhood room. Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays. The heart scatters across states, and has nothing left after what home takes from it.

Eve L. Ewing, Foreword of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib

[plexurade]

the poem begins not where the knife enters but where the blade twists. Some wounds cannot be hushed no matter the way one writes of blood & what reflection arrives in its pooling. The poem begins with pain as a mirror inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me before my first funeral & so the poem begins with old grief again at my neck.

Hanif Abdurraqib, The Prestige

[plexurade]

& if I present my body as a sacrifice I can finally walk away from it.

Erin Slaughter, The Sorrow Festival

[plexurade]

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

[plexurade]

I will never admit what his love is to me. Could you blame me? Firm as ice, given over to the power of his touch. Left to melt into a nothingness that I no longer recognize. Love is a death wish, paid in blood.  Just for you.

John Alex Baker, Death Wish

[plexurade]

I will never admit what he means to me. Will say he was simply a game I could not pass up.

John Alex Baker, Death Wish

[plexurade]

I think for a brief second that I am dreaming inside of my dream, that I had to make you up twice, just to get it right.

Caitlyn Siehl, Chocolate Chip Pancakes 

[plexurade]

To Search not verb, but vertigo. Does not indicate action. does not mean to go meet someone but rather to lie there because someone doesn't arrive.

Alejandra Pizarnik, trans. Yvette Siegert, To Search