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Dinner on the ocean floor in Nova Scotia | Travel+Leisure magazine

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:o) 

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paintin’

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Skeet

lord, give me  the confidence of a hot skeet girl one handed cigarette strutting across the tim’s parking lot there is no man deserving of her artillery slang, or the way her profile fits into the cliffs that frame the bay as if one day she just peeled herself off the landscape

she could level St John’s  with an expertly raised middle finger but chooses instead to have a large with fresh milk and three sugars

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Crow

Fire stealer, smooth talker, feet stuck firmly in mud, the crow washes the city off his wings in the water under the Dominion bridge.

He knows like all crows know the consequence of actions. Knows that to bury a body, you must first scratch the ground. Knows that too long in the city and a crow forgets:

never look a man straight on; never ignore a gravestone; remember the direction you’ve flown.  ---

Some men hang the heads of birds like trophies from their fence posts so their kin will know to stay away.  At night, the murder flies above his house and calls three times.

The morning news:  six year old girl with a strange head tilt and a sharp laugh scatters peanuts, collects crow gifts in a fisherman’s bait box. Rusty screw. Pearl heart. She holds a glass eye to the camera, squinting into the reflection. 

--- The crow washes the city off his wings under the Dominion bridge. Dunks his head below the water, and hears

the heart of a man with a stone in his eye weakly beating in vain  against beak upon beak upon beak.

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I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.

Jaime Gil de Biedma (via wordsnquotes)

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In my culture, we know death intimately. In Arabic, the highest expression of love is the phrase        “ya’aburnee” Translated “you bury me” - It means ��I love you so much, I’d sooner die than bury you” It was used by mothers in our lineage who were so used to losing their young in war; In my culture, we cannot talk about love without speaking death’s name

George Abraham, “Untitled,” published in Black Napkin Press (via bostonpoetryslam)

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The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.

W. B. Yeats, from “Maid Quiet” (via mitochondria)

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We read of stars escaping Newton’s chain till only autographs of fire remain; we aimed our mortal searchlights into space as if in hopes to find a mortal face.

Adrienne Rich, Collected Early Poems, (1950-1970) from ‘The Explorers’ (via incandescentghost)

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You have such a February face, so full of frost, of storm and cloudiness.

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (via loveage-moondream)

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I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence.

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (via wordsnquotes)

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Undressing the mermaid

As a boy, he played with the sea. Running in as close to the waves as he could before they tried to swallow him. Sinking his feet under wet sand until he was up to his ankles, baking in the sunlight.

When she floated into his periphery, he recognized her. Sea creature. Fish out of water, floundering in the kitchen at a friend of a friend’s party. He swam to her, hello’d to her. She clung a life raft. _

This is how he knew: horizon eyes. Used to discerning the sky from the sea, figuring far away limits when the sun is near to blinding.

Fingers not webbed but spread, wide over her kneecaps. Seaweed hair. Long toes curling over bedsheets.

Observing him from the other side of a tank.

The final clue was the taste of her skin: salt, crusted down the knobs of her spine, collected in the shadow of her collarbone the points of her hips. _

He told her, you taste like the sea. Horizon eyes. Was he discernable? Was he blind? A pearly laugh;

pray you can swim.

-by AllyJean

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Playing with shitty phone pictures

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A little poem to try out a new way of posting poetry, because it’s way easier to do this than mess around with html just to get single spacing.

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Not my hair

A moving crack on the pale porcelain, the long black hair slides out from under the tap in the bathroom sink two weeks after I’ve moved in. This is not my hair.

I rinse the hair down the drain, troubled by foreign toenail clippings, possible palm prints on doorknobs, dandruff and skin cells too tiny to see, to purge.

I live here now. Assembled a faux-birch dresser from Ikea, trimmed dingy windows, rugged impersonal laminate. Cleaned the pigeon shit off the balcony. I am not an imposter. But I missed the hair.

At night, skyscrapers peek around the bedroom curtain, blinking their hundred eyes when I try to sleep. The stranger in the next apartment over slides open the screen door to their identical balcony. A siren calls out someone else is in distress.

It wasn’t my hair.

But it could have been.

By AllyJean

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Canoe cove beach after an argument

combing fingers through salty tangles--

the waves like the breath before a kiss.

By AllyJean