#words

orpheuslament

do yall know about this

malaisequotes

“O how he loves you, darling boy. O how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night.”

You Are Jeff by Richard Siken

softcatullus

y’all the new richard siken poems are so goddamned sad (and also so fucking good, as expected) y’gotta read them.

driveway

heart valve

gun case

louisegluck

ALT

Margaret Atwood, from “Owl Song.” [ID in alt text]

seemoreandmore

“When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways to drink directly from the stream of cool water, I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone, who used to do the same thing at that age; And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied, wipes the water dripping from his cheek with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him to use a glass, the way our father told my brother, because I like remembering my brother when he was young, decades before anything went wrong, and I like the way my son becomes a little more my brother for a moment through this small habit born of a simple need, which, natural and unprompted, ties them together across the bounds of death, and across time … as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds and entered this one through the kitchen faucet, my son and brother drinking the same water.”

— A Drink of Water BY JEFFREY HARRISON

theoptia

Jean-Paul Sartre, from No Exit: And Three Other Plays; “No Exit”

Text ID: If I've got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.

wehavewords

“His touch both consoles and devastates me; I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.”

Angela Carter, The Erl-King

weusedtobegiants

you the garden and the grave,

Ada Limón, from Bright Dead Things: Poems

metaphorformetaphor

violentwavesofemotion:

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Music”. The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Graywolf Pr, 1986