feral-ballad
Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything; “Garden”
[Text ID: “Something is growing. / Plath said growing hurts at first, / but when does the hurting stop?”]
#words
Mary Oliver, from “I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable”, Blue Horses
sawasawako-archived
“It was around then that I realized for the first time that falling in love is like being haunted. Even before I opened my eyes in the morning, you would slip in under my eyelids. When I opened them, you instantly transferred to the ceiling, the wardrobe, the windowpane, the street, the far-off sky, and glimmered there like dappled light. You haunted me more persistently than I imagine any ghost ever could.”
– Greek Lessons, Han Kang, trans. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won
Guillaume Apollinaire, from Aubade (tr. by Donald Revell); Alcools: Poems, 1913
lifeinpoetry
and then I realize I am no longer
the one leading, my hand between
its teeth—fingers tumbling
down its gullet; I am
being eaten, leash
and all.
— Josh Corson, “THE ADDICT AS A DOG WALKER,” published in The Offing
derangedrhythms
What will become of you in the rage of this passion without an end?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, tr. David Constantine
cor-ardens
“At present, I am horrified with myself for containing—having devoured him—the dearest and only lover who ever loved me. I am his tomb. The earth is nothing. Dead. Staves and orchards issue from my mouth. His. Perfume my chest, which is wide, wide open. A greengage plum swells his silence. The bees escape from his eyes, from his sockets where the liquid pupils have flowed from under the flaccid eyelids. To eat a youngster shot on the barricades, to devour a young hero, is no easy thing. We all love the sun. My mouth is bloody. So are my fingers. I tore the flesh to shreds with my teeth. Corpses do not usually bleed. His did.”
Funeral Rites, Jean Genet, tr. Bernard Frechtman