#poetry journal

[belovedapollo]

A6 notebooks gifted to me by my fiancé, black is softcover moleskine, white is hardcover lamy and green is softcover leuchtturm1917 🌱 reblog is ok, don’t repost/use

[iphigeniacomplex]

[It is abominable, unquenchable by touch] by Diane Seuss

It is abominable, unquenchable by touch, closer to the sublime than sentimental, more animal than hominid, I've seen it in the eyes of birds weaving on a stem of ragweed, voracious, singular, there is no one like me, Dickinson in her narrow bed, her cold clenched hands, her penmanship unreadable, even following a recipe for black cake, her black cake came out strange, lusher than the template, and every freak I ever met had that same look in their eyes, armless, threading a needle with their lips and teeth, legless, rounding a corner on their cerulean cart, monarchic, imperious, wild, sad, and like every virgin queen, the need for love revolting and grand.

[sadiahakim]

But, you can't simply spend your whole life waiting for a miracle to happen, a person to appear, and a hand to hold.

— Sadia Hakim

[nightskies-and-sweetnothings]

finally did some bits of my journal that i made! so heres pages one, two, and the cover :)

i’ll put the august page in a separate post because i have something else that goes with it :)

[bloodorangesandtea]

"I will follow you everywhere - to the dusty corners of childhood, to every downfall and resurrection. Till your skin becomes my skin."

- Tishani Doshi, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

[angelofsmall]

poetry journal about "the circle" - a poem by me.

that's the update on the journal, it's been taking a while!

a.

[starmothpress]

@starmothpress on ig

Checkout how big my moleskine expanded is getting

This beauty has a little bit of everything

And so much more to go

[journalette]

against nostalgia by ada limón. this is an exercise i did last year for lina botero’s course visual poetry diary: recount with photography and verses

[carcassofapoet]

In the middle of telling you that I have depression,

and I like sour fruits so much that I’d rather

have no fruit than have sweet fruit,

and I sometimes peel back

old bruise wounds in search

of fresh blood,

what if I tell you that I am fine?

I am fine. What if I lied to you here in the middle of this page?

Do you think you can make out the lies

even when I underline it in red

and bleed all over my words

to make you understand?

Excerpt from Theme for English B after Langston Hughes

by Sreenidhi B., dated 17th May 2021

[kirthanasastry]

As a child I felt

The moon chased me

The subtle light falling 

On every step I take

he never failed a chance to disappoint

This small fragile heart  

It's the comfort I found in him

That I failed to find in most people

That surrounded me 

He healed the deepest scars 

Made by the ones who betrayed

Brought back the happiness 

That was once taken away 

A feeling of freedom under the night sky

The moon made me feel alive again

~K.S

[yllopyllor]

Work Poem: #5

Don’t think that I forgot

Everything you’ve done

I wouldn’t be this way

Happy and proud

If you didn’t hold my hand

While I healed

——————————————

Not my absolute best poem, but I was still able to crank one out! Work was definitely busy but that can’t stop the old mind!

[iphigeniacomplex]

Little Red-Cap by Carol Ann Duffy

At childhood's end, the houses petered out into playing fields, the factory, allotments kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit's caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,

my first. You might ask why. Here's why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake, my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

but got there, wolf's lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn't dearly love a wolf? Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws and went in search of a living bird — white dove —

which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth. One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said, licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

But then I was young — and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroom stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out, season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones. I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up. Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

[nicholaspopkey]

A Billion Drops of Water

Passing through cities in various countries, I scatter myself, living multiple lives, entertaining different versions of myself. With a healthy detachment, I allow and accept each life that I live. Not, as I learned does not serve me, with an obsession, by which all the eggs in the basket break at once, and the city sours, and the friends I had feel like phantoms, and the only light ahead is from the torch of a night train I don’t have a ticket for, and I must leap onto it as it is rushing by, throwing my bones to the wind for the sake of landing elsewhere. I have learned better.

Somewhere, away, there is always is another sea of phantoms, but they cannot cause me anxiety because I do not yet know them as friend or foe, and so their unknown shapes are fitting and acceptable.

To build a life somewhere and have it fall apart can feel like the greatest tragedy.

But if I can love myself unconditionally, knowing that at the deepest level of consciousness, I am all I will ever have (even in relation to others), then it should not bother me to begin again. Those fresh phantoms can be trusted, must be trusted, because without hope, there is no life at all.

From city to city, I find myself expressed in separate pieces, pieces which I can only sometimes give names to, but mostly they are flashes, like the truth in dreams, drifting out of comprehension when the first thoughts of the day replace them.

These pieces of self cannot commit to a subject or object or knowledge of self, and instead, by their very existence, are more akin to a billion drops of water; they can only take shape as independent entities brought together by a serendipitous fusing. Wrapped up in a net of indescribable energia that is entirely of the moment, buzzing at a point of focus that is not created, affected, or controlled by human effort. But it wraps up these moments of clarity all the same.

[nightskies-and-sweetnothings]

happy first day of fall!!! and so i bring yall the september page in my journal, along with the playlist :)

[hiromisuzukimicrojournal]

Alone in the Pacific

✽

Pinky the fairy is a small giant, raising newts in her ears. She lives in Fountain named by Duchamp. In the corner of the memory warehouse. Ground floor of Invective Laboratory. Where the ceiling lights are broken.

Dr. Murmur, the director of the laboratory. Suffering from passion withdrawal, he hums in the cracked mirror fascinated by the neurons firing the rhythmic signals.

✽

images: hiromi suzuki

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Note: Alone in the Pacific is a part of the first poetry collection Ms. cried – 77 poems by hiromi suzuki (kisaragi publishing, 2013 ISBN978-4-901850-42-1). The poems written in Japanese have been translated by hiromi suzuki, 2023.

✽ ✽ ✽

Alone in the Pacific / Hiromi Suzuki

© poetry by hiromi suzuki, 2023

published in RIC Journal (September 29, 2023)

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via RIC Journal