This Made Me Cry So Now I Need Everyone To See It

“a community without romance risks being brutish and crass, superficial and brittle, cruel and even muderous. . . i don’t mean just romantic romance. i don’t just mean erotic romance. . . i mean the romance that allows us to soften our voices when we see each other.”

maya angelou, 1998

I can’t stop thinking about this poem today.

witchgrass, louise glück

after the fire by Ada Limón

jason molina’s writing advice to matthew j barnhart via his blackberry in 2008 

to be perfectly honest i think that ghosts being transluscent and faded is kind of antithetical to what they represent. they're an echo that cannot move on, cannot fade out - they should be oversaturated and stiff and strangely out of place and unchanging, like something preserved in clear glass.

the thing is that childhood doesn't just end when you turn 18 or when you turn 21. it's going to end dozens of times over. your childhood pet will die. actors you loved in movies you watched as a kid will die. your grandparents will die, and then your parents will die. it's going to end dozens and dozens of times and all you can do is let it. all you can do is stand in the middle of the grocery store and stare at freezers full of microwave pizza because you've suddenly been seized by the memory of what it felt like to have a pizza party on the last day of school before summer break. which is another ending in and of itself

Naomi Shihab Nye, from Fuel: Poems; “Hidden”

[Text ID: "If you tuck the name of a loved one / under your tongue too long / without speaking it / it becomes blood"]

“Some animals take themselves away to a private place to die, into the forest or under a raised wooden deck constructed of weather-treated pine. Are there animals that seek out the most public place to die, the greatest number of eyes to watch them lie down, roll over, stiffen? Is it true that all living creatures feel the instinct to survive, or are there ones that don’t, only we know nothing about them because they die so swiftly, in utter silence, before they can be seen and recorded?”

You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine - Alexandra Kleeman (2015)