when you’re a lesbian out of LA in love
with a girl out of Brooklyn
Connecticut’s your Vegas.
and there’s no Elvis here, no
altars set up just across the border

for those escaping neighboring states
with their hearts
in their gloveboxes.
just a court house in a small town

in a state with some paper that says
any two adult humans in love
have earned its protection
and should have the law on their side
at least in this. so you call

your best friend in Chicago, say
there’s a ticket at the airport
with your name on it. get your girl
out of bed, say shake the sugar

from your eyes, we’re getting married
next Saturday. we’re headed
to Connecticut in an economy car
with four good wheels,
we’ll leave the motorcycle behind

so they don’t stop us at the border
for throwing off our helmets
and trying to eat the sun. we deserve
as much crazy as the couple

at the truck stop screaming over
the baby and driving away. I hope
their wedding day had bells. had a song
nobody had ever heard cousin Marcie sing
so well, that it made them cry. that days

like these when the road’s just rock
pounded flat and the baby’s been hollering
for miles, that song comes on the radio.
and it isn’t Marcie singing, she’s back in Hartford

with the kids, you know they’ve got the flu
again, and the song has this one part that says
wise men say, only fools rush in – it’s Elvis
and Elvis always makes her smile, even the baby’s
gotten quiet and maybe they don’t know

or can’t be bothered to care that their state
small as it is, so small the name doesn’t fit
on the map but floats out in the Atlantic
like a geographic afterthought, their state

got it right on this, got it so human
that lesbians are crossing the border looking
for a town with a name like Suffield
or Weatogue or East Berlin because it sounds
like a club and there’s a court house open

on Saturday mornings and they’ve got to be back
in Brooklyn by nightfall and they don’t need
Elvis or a preacher or even this piece of paper
but they’re going for it all the same

because sometimes love grabs you that
crazy hard, gets you to hold her
in arms you did not know you had,
sometimes you roll over
in the morning and you never

want to leave, you say take
my hand, take my whole life too,
for I can’t help falling in love with you.
I can’t help falling in love, with you.

— Marty McConnell, Ten of Cups

Louise Glück, “First Memory”

sharingpoetry:

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

(source; submitted by shriven)

(via rememo)

rememo:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart- Jack Gilbert (via krrnpoetry)

“Prompt #8: THROUGH THE DOOR

Find a quote you love, a piece of advice, a proverb. Number your page 1 to 15. Write the quote you love in the 15 spot. For example, my quote is “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” Then, on line 14, mishear your quote through a door. So for example, my line 14 would be “Sue the fear it takes. Share the gun.” Do the same from line 14 to 13. Mine would be “Brew the tear-lit cakes. Bear the sun.”

Do this, moving backward up the page all the way to the 1 spot, moving backward up the page. When done, erase the numbers. Where you end up is the beginning of your poem.

The point is to get loose, stretch your ear, hear something new. The point is for advice to grow from the crooked places, the jumbled, the mistaken. This is underwater gossip. Dive and gurgle.”

(from: college compatriot Shira E.)

slice of heaven (to hold you, staggered.) beneath
the letters, price of lovers. life it batters
belief, it leaves her christ no brother the lying
bitten, bruised feed a broken tryst
another, for smiling, hit her.
soothed no need, resist across a mile
bitter noon on her knees
a test a crash the moss the barter
a swoon a please; address her straps of loss.
a starter moon to slow, tease
undress the wraps, uncross. a heart-ship tune
in blows, breeze-by egress stopped
on loss. (of hardship truth sings low.) bodies
carve. loving cryptic across the rips and
blew across the ties, cared no-
thing tips without a smash . parts lips; true snare of thighs bared, toughened. spit your craft art hits you
where you rise. stare up and lit your laugh,
hard to lift (but shit, we try.) rare rough on phonographs,
stars sit and write or collide
tear up the photograph. cause it’s a bright blue sky.

Pole Dancer by Andrea Gibson, a poem for National Poetry Month

ericacv:

She pole-dances to gospel hymns.
Came out to her family in the middle of Thanksgiving grace.
I knew she was trouble
two years before our first date.
But my heart was a Labrador Retriever
with its head hung out the window of a car
tongue flapping in the wind
on a highway going 95
whenever she walked by.

So I mastered the art of crochet
and I crocheted her a winter scarf
and one night at the bar I gave it to her with a note
that said something like,
I hope this keeps your neck warm.
If it doesn’t give me a call.

The key to finding love
is fucking up the pattern on purpose
is skipping a stitch,
is leaving a tiny, tiny hole to let the cold in
and hoping she mends it with your lips.

This morning I was counting her freckles.
She has five on the left side of her face, seven on the other
and I love her for every speck of trouble she is.
She’s frickin’ awesome.
Like popcorn at a drive-in movie
that neither of us has any intention of watching.
Like Batman and Robin
in a pick-up truck in the front row with the windows steamed up.
Like Pacman in the eighties,
she swallows my ghosts.

Slaps me on my dark side and says,
“Baby, this is the best day ever.”
So I stop listening for the sound of the ocean
in the shells of bullets I hoped missed us
to see there are white flags from the tips of her toes
to her tear ducts
and I can wear her halos as handcuffs
‘cause I don’t wanna be a witness to this life,
I want to be charged and convicted,
ear lifted to her song like a bouquet of yes
because my heart is a parachute that has never opened in time
and I wanna fuck up that pattern,
leave a hole where the cold comes in and fill it every day with her sun,
‘cause anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds
knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay than to go.

And I want to grow
strong as the last patch of sage on a hillside
stretching towards the lightning.
God has always been an arsonist.
Heaven has always been on fire.
She is a butterfly knife bursting from a cocoon in my belly.
Love is a half moon hanging above Baghdad
promising to one day grow full,
to pull the tides through our desert wounds
and fill every clip of empty shells with the ocean.
Already there is salt on my lips.

Lover, this is not just another poem.
This is my goddamn revolt.
I am done holding my tongue like a bible.
There is too much war in every verse of our silence.
We have all dug too many trenches away from ourselves.

This time I want to melt like a snowman in Georgia,
‘til my smile is a pile of rocks you can pick up
and skip across the lake of your doubts.

Trust me,
I have been practicing my ripple.
I have been breaking into mannequin factories
and pouring my pink heart into their white paint.
I have been painting the night sky upon the inside of doorframes
so only moonshine will fall on your head in the earthquake.
I have been collecting your whispers and your whiplash
and your half-hour-long voice mail messages.
Lover, did you see the sunset tonight?
Did you see Neruda lay down on the horizon?
Do you know it was his lover who painted him red,
who made him stare down the bullet holes
in his country’s heart?

I am not looking for roses.
I want to break like a fever.
I want to break like the Berlin Wall.
I want to break like the clouds
so we can see every fearless star,
how they never speak guardrail,
how they can only say fail.

(via fuckyeahandreagibson)

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World - Sherman Alexie

crushedfingers:

The morning air is all awash with angels
—Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is blessed among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,”

I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—

How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.
“I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—

And I didn’t realize my mistake
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days

And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

curiosity will catch you dear for you are a writer and it is your license to startle the world with a hundred thousand words instead of a dazzling smile or those occasional winks and i don’t want to probe for after all you are renouncing all the time and i don’t want to stop you racing against life but i have been there and i have returned and i know what happens when it takes hold of a woman yes i know what happens then but i will not tell you the answers i have sealed my lips i have learnt how not to say what i must be saying somehow i don’t want to be fledging you in security for what happens with all my parenting will only be a compromise darling child instead i let you free i want you to ask the questions i want you to prick and not polish your wounds i will let you to be hurt in the face of the world i want you to learn more than what you want to learn sometimes i feel i want you to get hurt badly hurt and bleed before the world and then i shall sit back and feel my work is done for once you have known what pain is then you shall know how to preserve the fringes of happiness i want you to be alone in the ravenous world where you never know what happens next just so that you will no longer find routine to be so despicable and amidst that pervading fuzziness you shall long for an anchor for all your dreams only realizing much later that you are your safety you are your ultimate but till then you might screech and scream but when you retain your temperament you will find that life will always lie waiting like an hungry beast and at each turn you take i wish you learn the greater horrors and now i confess darling i want you hurt because i want to watch you fight and fight and fight i want you to pull together those moonbeams of hope i want you to throb precariously i want you to be living on the edge i want you to learn the thousand one ways in which you can melt the boundaries of saturation called death and the emptiness of life and the fidgetiness of what might be called love i want you to lose i want you to win but some day i want you to be free

— a breathless council, meena kandasamy.

favorites.
of all time, of all time.

(Source: meenakandasamy.wordpress.com)

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,

Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

— tired of speaking sweetly, hafiz.

I am always hungry
& wanting to have
sex. This is a fact.
If you get right
down to it the new
unprocessed peanut
butter is no damn
good & you should
buy it in a jar as
always in the
largest supermarket
you know. And
I am an enemy
of change, as
you know. All
the things I
embrace as new
are in
fact old things,
re-released: swimming,
the sensation of
being dirty in
body and mind
summer as a
time to do
nothing and make
no money. Prayer
as a last re-
sort. Pleasure
as a means,
and then a
means again
with no ends
in sight. I am
absolutely in opposition
to all kinds of
goals. I have
no desire to know
where this, anything
is getting me.
When the water
boils I get
a cup of tea.
Accidentally I
read all the
works of Proust.
It was summer
I was there
so was he. I
write because
I would like
to be used for
years after
my death. Not
only my body
will be compost
but the thoughts
I left during
my life. During
my life I was
a woman with
hazel eyes. Out
the window
is a crooked
silo. Parts
of your
body I think
of as stripes
which I have
learned to
love along. We
swim naked
in ponds &
I write be-
hind your
back. My thoughts
about you are
not exactly
forbidden, but
exalted because
they are useless,
not intended
to get you
because I have
you & you love
me. It’s more
like a playground
where I play
with my reflection
of you until
you come back
and into the
real you I
get to sink
my teeth. With
you I know how
to relax. &
so I work
behind your
back. Which
is lovely.
Nature
is out of control
you tell me &
that’s what’s so
good about
it. I’m immoderately
in love with you,
knocked out by
all your new
white hair

why shouldn’t
something
I have always
known be the
very best there
is. I love
you from my
childhood,
starting back
there when
one day was
just like the
rest, random
growth and
breezes, constant
love, a sand-
wich in the
middle of
day,
a tiny step
in the vastly
conventional
path of
the Sun. I
squint. I
wink. I
take the
ride.

— peanut butter, eileen myles

Nighttime Begins with a Line by Pablo Neruda, Yusef Komunyakaa

kathleenjoy:

So my body went on growing, by night,
went on pleading & singing to the earth
I was born to be woven back into Love,
let me see if I can’t sink my roots
deeper into you, your minerals & water,
your leaf rot & gold, your telling & un-
telling of the oldest tales inscribed
on wind-carved rocks, silt & grass,
your songs & prayers, your oaths & myths,
your nights & days in one unending lament,
your luminous swarm of wet kisses
& stings, your spleen & mind,
your outrageous forgetting & remembrance,
your ghosts & rebirths, your thunderstones
& mushrooms, & your kind loss of memory.

(via ahuntersheart)

All day it has been raining,
and all day this poem has been sinking
into my skin like sticky blossoms.
The sky a grey-blue bucket,
heavy and tarnished to its rims with
copper lightning—shaking, rumbling,
this rain I have carried in ruddy pails
from far north to the sun-thick South.

The earth is splitting at its seams,
goldenrod and foxglove and an abundant
green spilling from the red-clay heart
of the hillside.

All day it has been raining,
and you have been wanting me the way
a thirsty child begs her father—
or friend—or whoever will listen—
to lift her up to the water fountain
so she may take a sip, suck in hard,
and swallow.

Now our hands are laced, loping along
through the forest, our faces shimmering
in the good heat, skins fair against the finery
of the tall, untattling trees.
Standing, leaning,
our backs in turn to the tree,
root-worn and mossy to its crevices,
until we return to the earth somehow,
burrowing back into the beauty from which
we came—still ours to reclaim—
and your hands are in my hair, and the leaves,
and my legs wobble beneath me as though
they might collapse, and my back arches, and
my body lifts up out of itself, jolted by your fingers which
parse me perfectly down the middle—
jagged lightning of your touch,
swell of my lips and my breasts.

It was raining, as I think I mentioned,
so I was slick, slicker than usual,
so tender and joyful I could afford neither
carelessness nor fear
as when the fireflies appeared and surrounded us
with their circle of light, and the doe floated past
in pursuit of something precious
and I touched with my own hands all
that was precious in all the world to me,
and your knees buckled, and your heart braced,
and from deep in your throat
I heard you come like a loud, bright
canticle of birds.

— the storm, julie marie wade

(Source: pankmagazine.com)