#US poetry

[elskanellis]

Coffee

Matthew Dickman

The only precious thing I own, this little espresso cup. And in it a dark roast all the way from Honduras, Guatemala, Ethiopia where coffee was born in the 9th century getting goat herders high, spinning like dervishes, the white blooms cresting out of the evergreen plant, Ethiopia where I almost lived for a moment but then the rebels surrounded the Capital so I stayed home. I stayed home and drank coffee and listened to the radio and heard how they were getting along. I would walk down Everett Street, near the hospital where my older brother was bound to his white bed like a human mast, where he was getting his mind right and learning not to hurt himself. I would walk by and be afraid and smell the beans being roasted inside the garage of an old warehouse. It smelled like burnt toast! It was everywhere in the trees. I couldn't bear to see him. I sometimes never knew him. Sometimes he would call. He wanted us to sit across from each other, some coffee between us, sober. Coffee can taste like grapefruit or caramel, like tobacco, strawberry, cinnamon, the oils being pushed out of the grounds and floating to the top of a French Press, the expensive kind I get in the mail, the mailman with a pound of Sumatra under his arm, ringing my doorbell, waking me up from a night when all I had was tea and watched a movie about the Queen of England when Spain was hot for all her castles and all their ships, carved out of fine Spanish trees, went up in flames while back home Spaniards were growing potatoes and coffee was making its careful way along a giant whip from Africa to Europe where cafes would become famous and people would eventually sit with their cappuccinos, the baristas talking about the new war, a cup of sugar on the table, a curled piece of lemon rind. A beret on someone's head, a scarf around their neck. A bomb in a suitcase left beneath a small table. Right now I'm sitting near a hospital where psychotropics are being carried down the hall in a pink cup, where someone is lying there and he doesn't know who he is. I'm listening to the couple next to me talk about their cars. I have no idea how I got here. The world stops at the window while I take my little spoon and slowly swirl the cream around the lip of the cup. Once, I had a brother who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke his cigarettes and be quiet for a moment before his brain turned its Armadas against him, wanting to burn down his cities and villages, before grief became his capital with its one loyal flag and his face, perhaps only his beautiful left eye, shimmed on the surface of his Americano like a dark star.

©2008

[menandwomanofhistory]

John Ashbury

[lotrmusical]

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

[muchlovefleursblog]

[frigidwife]

i've been feeling incredible anger and frustration lately with these posts lamenting what the next four years will look like in the u.s., how much "worse" things will get under the trump administration, as if we haven't been witnessing a holocaust for the past year funded by the biden administration. if you have seen a single video from gaza, a single picture, read a feature from a gazan journalist, spoken to a single person in your inbox when they plead for your attention and help, words like "worse" or "better" turn to ash in your mouth. just yesterday my friend hilda texted me that even when her family manages to get food, smoke from the fire needed to cook aggravates her sinus allergies, making it difficult to breathe. this is how she's been living for the past year and a month, under a democrat-funded genocide.

below is a small fraction of the palestinians who have reached out to me for help with their campaigns. it is a huge source of shame to me that i can't keep up with all of the people in my inbox. please go to their accounts and read their stories. and please give what you can spare.

hilda @hildanasr1 / GFM - 5%

dina @dina179 / GFM - 33%

yousseff @youseffamily / GFM - 92%

suad @suad-khaled / GFM - 51%

nada @nadamd44 / GFM - 1%

asma @asmaayyad2 / GFM - 62%

shehab family @reemshehabnew / GFM - 90%

yahya @yahyabkheet-blog / GFM - 21%

mohammed @mohammed-hassouna1 / GFM - 19%

abdulrahman @3bdulra7manosama / GFM - 9%

mai @abuhamdasblog / GFM - 5%

ibrahim @aburakhiaibrahim / GFM - 22%

mona @mansh99 / GFM - 13%

ahmed @najah-meshal5 / GFM - 16%

noor @noor-yashour / GFM - 10%

*ALL CAMPAIGNS ARE VETTED*

[liaisboring]

[sorrcha]

benthic angel

was writing about lake sturgeon for a class assignment and showed one of my friends what i'd written.. he then sent part of it back to me with line breaks to turn it into a poem! i just had to draw something for it :]

poem text under the readmore:

lake sturgeon don't know that they're endangered. They don't know anything - other than the muck at the bottom of the water column and the occasional passing touch of another.

really touched by how my friend turned my technical writing into poetry. i haven't tried to write creatively in months, so it's nice to see i've still got it- and nicer still that i could get so inspired by my friend, since i haven't made nature art in a little while, either :>!!

[ccomelantartidee]

“Too well tangled”🤍

[lithium-poet]

i'd see you in the hall like "hello, hello" up against the wall like "let's go, let's go" ⋅˚₊‧ ୨୧ ‧₊˚ ⋅꩜

𝓁ℴ𝓋ℯ, 𝒶𝓇𝒶𝒷ℯ𝓁𝓁𝒶

[elixirofblues]

[elskanellis]

The Illiterate

William Meredith

Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone. His uncle could have left the farm to him, Or his parents died before he sent them word, Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved. Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. What would you call his feeling for the words That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

.

[saltair-and-webweaves]

i get mean when i’m nervous like a bad dog

Unknown/@papayajuan2019/a hero of our time - mikhail lermontov/poor things (2023)/ @sarakleijn/venetta octavia/ @papayajuan2019/@ https.c0rps3 on instagram/cop car - mitski

[nightmareevara]

Being called "my girl" hits different

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

A poem written by Marcellus Williams about Palestine.

Despite DNA evidence proving his innocence, he was executed on September 24, 2024.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[taimanzano]

One of one. One, alone, one.