The Galena Evening Times, Kansas, January 18, 1900

Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, 1940

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Nicole W. Lee, from "Even the Dust"

November Graveyard

by Sylvia Plath

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

You don’t like the way your hair sits? Take mine, I will shear it off without a second thought.

Take my eyes so you may see through them just how beautiful you are.

Take my lungs, that you should never gasp for air.

You’re not comfortable in your skin? Take mine, I will strip it from my body just to see you smile.

My heart is already yours, it has been beating to the sound of your name ever since I first heard it uttered. Take it, it is more yours than it ever was mine.

Take my muscles. May they make you strong enough to never need another.

I will give and give of myself until I am nothing but a meager pile of brittle and broken bones.

Take them. May they be of more use to you than I ever could have been.

Franciszek Żmurko - Morning star.

Circe Invidiosa by John William Waterhouse (1892)

Crawling out of the swamps where you buried me like the setting sun and the moon rises an enemy.

Carolina Outcrop. Never Trust a Woman Who Writes.

I listen to and read poetry

Not just to create poetry

But because I want everything I say to sound like poetry

To become more beautiful through the beauty that I speak

To make my great-grandmother proud

To become art

Pittsburgh Daily Post, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1927