Portuguese – untranslatable word referring to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love, which is lost. We love each other like brutes. Gorgeouslyand twilled. Any geography is hard. The skinends where skin ends.It’s mapless. I want to be borrowed, to beassembled, again. To feel a tug on the otherside of… Continue reading Kimberly Grey
(Vintage February 1, 1994) It is so beautiful to have no attachments!I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find, it whatever it is? I wait and ache. — Sylvia Plath, from “Three Women; A Poem For Three Voices,” The Collected Poems. (Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition September 2, 2008)
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two… Continue reading Hunter S. Thompson
But I have burned already down to bone.There is a fire that burns beyond the namesOf sludge and filth of which this world is made.Agony sears the dark flesh of the body,And lifts me higher than the smoke, to riseAbove the earth, above the sacrifice;Until my soul flares outward like a blueBlossom of gas fire… Continue reading James Wright
This Room and Everything in It Lie still nowwhile I prepare for my future,certain hard days ahead,when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment. I am making useof the one thing I learnedof all the things my father tried to teach me: the art of memory. I am letting this roomand everything in… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the… Continue reading Mark Z. Danielewski
Without even knowing it, I havebelieved in you for a long time. When I looked at my blood under a microscope I could see truth multiplying over and over. —Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma persuaded me but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass thrust up above the… Continue reading Tony Hoagland
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.Now there is no question even of that, but onlyOf holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies acrossThe upper corner of the window, you brush your hair awayAnd cannot quite see,… Continue reading John Ashbery
But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until… Continue reading John Green
But to return to the cradle rocking. I thinkNabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.That’s why babies howl at birth,and why the dying so often reachfor something only they can apprehend. — Jane Kenyon, from “Reading Aloud to My Father,” Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. (Graywolf Press; Reprint edition August 1, 1997)
