#bottom poem is Hanif Abdurraqib

[atopvisenyashill]

There were so many ways to die, and if the king should perish, who then would follow him? King Aegon himself, when asked, put forward his cupbearer, Gaemon Palehair, reminding the regents that the boy had “been a king before.”

As a bastard born of a whore, Gaemon counted for little in the court, so when Ser Gareth asked Lord Peake to make the lad the king’s whipping boy, the Hand was pleased to do so. Gaemon’s blood and Gaemon’s tears reached the king as none of Gareth Long’s words ever had, and His Grace’s improvement was soon marked by every man who watched him in the castle yard, but the king’s mislike of his teacher only deepened.

[paladinbaby]

can’t call you a stranger, but can’t call you up

14 lines from love letters or suicide notes, doc luben / the power unbound, freya marske; photo my own / biotherm (for bill berkson), frank o’hara / georgia, phoebe bridgers / joy is not promised to you, hanif abdurraqib interviewed by ruth awad / wolf or-7, natalie diaz / i’m not speaking first, hala alyan / owl and pussycat some years later, margaret atwood / the dogs i have kissed, trista mateer / i had a dream about you, richard siken

[Image Description: Ten images of text.

1: “The ivy grew too fast. I searched in so many spots. It seemed impossible that I had missed one. But I never found it. How can something be there, and then not there? How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we did not become?”

2: A square photo of the sky at sunset. There are dark trees along the bottom edge. The sky is blue but is mostly covered in clouds. Text in the top left corner reads “The past had a heavy fist around his heart. What he was wait-ing for was for it to physically hurt.” The text is a split up photo of a printed line.

3: “the moon is rising / I am always thinking of the moon rising / I am always thinking of you”

4: Black text on a blue background. “Will you have me / Or watch me fall? / If I fix you / Will you hate me?”

5: “I think what I value most are people who love me enough to be angry at me then come back and still love me. People who are patient with me when they have no right to be. People who know me well enough to know that I am a collage of failures with some really good intentions.”

6: “I confuse instinct for desire - isn’t bite also touch?” Bite and touch are written in italics. The whole line is highlighted in red.

7: “I want to love something. / I want to love something without having to apologise for it. Please don’t tell.”

8: “Anything can become a saint if you pray to it enough -”

9: A photo of a poem written out in a lined notebook, the spiral binding is visible on the right edge of the image. The first line is in block capitals. “I Swear Somewhere This Works

In a parallel universe or another world / or a different life

we sit across from each other

at the kitchen table

and go over / the grocery / list.”

10: “In the dream I don’t tell anyone, you put your head in my lap.” End ID.]

[whisperthatruns]

Love Your Niggas

I am again considering how I sit inside the space between two gs as I did when the officer thumbed the handle of his weapon & asked

what you boys doing out so late one night on Livingston while the skin of me & two of my niggas hushed the brightness of the streetlights

& we were old enough boys to know when someone wasn’t actually calling us boys & look at how these fools put dancing shoes on all that language

like my niggas ain’t write the book & then have the book stolen & then take back whatever pages they could before slipping out a window & what you have

to realize is that fire knows no master beyond whatever hands summoned it & in virginia the torches sprayed a mist of sparks across the sky & in ohio me &

my niggas threw our hands over a fire & let the flame turn meat brown & cracked jokes until somebody’s mama got to rolling over in her grave & some niggas might say

to force movement out of the dead is another way to keep the ancestors close & so I sin & I sin & I sin & I know & I hope when I die there are some niggas

still kicking it & willing to yell something heavy & improper about my living so that I too may know what it is to roll over & to roll up on a nigga is another type of intimacy

& once, we rolled up on some niggas over a card game or over some weed or over loneliness & I guess loneliness is another type of debt & there is no cure for the ache

of living like running with some niggas who might actually get your ass killed & speaking of absence I am considering how the space between the two gs is where we might congregate

those who love us & those who want to see us dead. oh, how we’ve both found ourselves wedded to the way the g sits in the back of the throat for a swift moment before tumbling

down the tongue & out of a car window in a town where you might be far away from your niggas & I am wondering if this is the common ground I have been hearing so much about. It seems I love

my gs as you do, executioner. & what a tool this is for both of us. the way one can wrap their fingers around the letter’s open mouth & use its bottom to dig a grave. during the q&a, the old black woman

who could be my kin in the way that anyone who has outlived my kin could be my kin asks me what I think about putting the word nigga in my poems & in another voice, she is asking if I know

who had to die for me to be here with this ungrateful tongue & who am I to curate the small space between love & violence & I think of this when I say I love you nigga & slap a hand so hard that the blood vibrates underneath my palm for hours. I want the ghost of every type of love I have for my niggas to echo for days like these, where it is raining in a city & I make mirrors out of every surface so that I am both me & all my niggas. & I am considering the g again. all my gs done dirt & some have become it. my gs wish to be made into ash upon their leaving but we bury my gs anyway. my niggas ain’t ones to miss a chance to get fly & a funeral will do if nothing else will. god grant me a good grave in your gracious ground. let someone else be kept awake at night by the sound

of my body moving the earth in the name of my niggas & all of their breathing & iridescent sins.

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House Books, 2019)