“Sometimes We Want What We Want Even If We Know It’s Going To Kill Us.”

Margaret Atwood, Interlunar; from ‘Eurydice’

when margaret atwood said “i'm sorry there is so much pain in this story” and richard siken said “there is no other version of this story” and mary oliver said “you don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway, i don’t want to tell it”

Introduction to the Body in Fairy Tales by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jon Ware, I Am In Eskew

“The sadness of the past is with me always.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald (via therepublicofletters)

                                   My love,                     what we make of loss is a sport  that kills us. 

Natalie Wee, “Asami Writes to Korra for Three Years” in Wildness Journal

“Love has something to do with the notion of being seen — the opposite of invisibility. The invisible, the unwitnessed, the unacknowledged, the isolated, the lonely — these are the unloved. Loving attention illuminates the unseen, escorting them from the frontiers of lovelessness into the observed world. To truly see someone — anyone — is an act that acknowledges and forgives our common and imperfect humanity. Love enacts a kind of vigilant perception — whether it is to a partner, a child, a co-worker, a neighbour, a fellow citizen, or any other person one may encounter in this life. Love says softly — I see you. I recognise you. You are human, as am I.”

— Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files Issue #103

love in the time of cholera, gabriel garcía márquez // carmilla, joseph sheridan le fanu // letter of testimony, octavio paz (trans. eliot weinburger) // planet of love, richard siken // the queen of carthage, louise glück // excerpt from a letter to fanny brawne, john keats // little weirds, jenny slate // clarification, franz wright // sonnet lxvi, pablo neruda (trans. ilan stavans) // gone: poems, fanny howe.

“It is holy / to say any name 3 times, but I’ve stood in front of enough mirrors/ to know no one is coming / just because you ask for them”

— Reyna N.A. Excerpt of “Ghost”, from “Hand Made Ghosts” (via exit152)

gothic poetry recs??

Edgar Allen Poe: all of his poems

Emily Brontë: all of her poems

Alice Notley, Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, “Haunted Houses”: All houses wherein men have lived and died / are haunted houses.

Dana Levin, “styx”: if you // slit your wrist you could make them speak.

William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” “A Divine Image”: Terror the Human Form Divine 

Margaret Atwood, “Mushrooms” “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein” “Marrying the Hangman”: What was my ravenous motive? / Why did I make you? 

Jorge Luis Borges, “Two English Poems”:  I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the / hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you / with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat

Frank Bidart, “The Ghost”: if I had merely made you / love me you could not have saved me.

María Negroni, “Rosamundi”: they are bearing a / black wooden coffin and within it I, the invisible / bride

Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”: She lives on a moor in the north. / She lives alone. / Spring opens like a blade there.

Emily Dickinson, “[The Loneliness One Dare not Sound]″: Its caverns and its corridors / Illuminate—or seal—

Jericho Brown, “Dear Dr. Frankenstein”: I, too, know the science of building men / Out of fragments in little light

Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” “Ariel” “Fever 103°”: I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.

Hughes Mearns, “Antigonish [I met a man who wasn’t there]”: Yesterday, upon the stair, / I met a man who wasn’t there

Robert Lowell, “Florence“: Ah, to have known, to have loved / too many David and Judiths!

Gregory Orr, “Gathering the Bones Together”: I was twelve when I killed him; / I felt my own bones wrench from my body.

Paisley Rekdal, “Bats”: They flutter, shake like mystics. / They materialize.