A hot sun cracks my lips
A harsh wind scrapes at my skin
I can’t breathe
Vultures gnaw on my stomach, my liver
Worms crawl through my arteries,
Clogging up the already-useless veins.
Bile begins to rise from the pit,
Up through my gullet
The sickly heat scratches its way up my throat
And dribbles from the corner of my burning mouth
Transparent circles crowd in on my eyes
And insects crawl into my ears, dragging in sand on their feet
Mother Nature
Mother you have murdered me!
Mother how long will you torture me?
My arm falls limp to my side
And I can do nothing but
Let Nature take its everlasting toll
-
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‘Haiku’ by Sonia Sanchez
There are things sadder
than you and I. Some people
do not even touch. -
Drowning Girl by Ursula K. Le Guin
My head is wet
My head is wet
Something
Something
I forget
I did not want to wash my hair
Something terrible
unbearable
or maybe not
Sometimes babies are born dead
It doesn’t matter
in the water
what I wanted or forgot -
Paul Klee, Beginning of a Poem (via spurloser)
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Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife. -
"You are always eighteen or married
or both, carrying inside you
a surgeon or a singer growing
away from you like a little cloud,
and you have just escaped
from the leprosarium hidden
beyond the horizon’s lead smudge,
slinking through damp kudzu
to rap at my window
in the slowly sprawling darkness,
in the sodden green glow
of these two nights, mine
and yours. Or you’ve retired
from a secret life,
the oath sworn upon your bleeding thumb
now broken. The petal,
a curled pink that fell
and boiled in the black mirror of my coffee,
for a moment today was you
just as you were the bone of a thin girl’s hip
swimming beneath her
skin like a fish.
Limbless girl
bowling via surrogate
while a jukebox ate through change,
your smile
once broke the earth open like a bone
ribboned with silk red
marrow. In the smoke rank air
all the world did
was turn and turning
away I began to keep your secrets like my own."“On Being Asked Who The You Is In My Poems,” Paul Guest (via clavicola) -
“Oh God, Fuck Me” by Ruth L. Schwartz
Fuck me, oh God, with ordinary things,
the things you love best in this world––
like trees in spring, exposing themselves,
flashing leaf-buds so firm and swollen
I want to take them into my mouth.
Speaking of trees, fuck me with birds,
say, and enormous raucous crow,
proud as a man with his hand down his pants,
and then a sparrow, intimately brown,
discreet and cautious as a concubine.
Fuck me with my kitchen faucet, dripping
like a nymphomaniac,
all night slowly filling a filling,
then overflowing the bowls in the sink––
and with the downstairs neighbor’s vacuum,
that great sucking noisy dragon -
What I Never Told You About the Abortion by Alison Townsend
That it hurt, despite the anesthetic,
which they administered with a long needle, shot straight into the womb.
That they hit the vagus nerve the first time and I fell down when I tried to stand.
That after the second shot my legs snapped shut—
instinctively as any wild mother protecting chick, kit, cub.
That I held the hand of a young Hispanic nurse and wept
when she said, “You know, hon, you don’t have to do this.”
That I believed I did, though I nearly got up and left.
That the doctor was crude, saying (when he saw me conscious),
“It’s always the ones who want to be awake who should be put out.” -
– from ‘God and After’ by Sophie Mayer
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