March 2012
15 posts
I am happy living simply
rabbit-light:
I am happy living simply: like a clock, or a calendar. Worldly pilgrim, thin, wise — as any creature. To know the spirit is my beloved. To come to things — swift as a ray of light, or a look. To live as I write: spare — the way God asks me — and friends do not.
Marina Tsvetaeva
1919
“I’m sorry I don’t call. Sorry I snuck down the stairs and out to the mouth of a...”
– Jeanann Verlee, Genetics of Regret (via grammatolatry)
February 2012
17 posts
you are a pharmacy, Nate Slawson
you have a hundred secret names & I am the world’s worst shoplifter. you know what I mean? it’s like it’s 1992 & we’re so happy for cigarettes & de la soul & lightning bugs & shit like that. sometimes I wish you knew someone exactly like me who wasn’t so obsessed with your knuckles. they make me hurt like alligator teeth. I want you to be all fists & bruises like...
Bedroom Life with Ceramic Frog, Joshua Diamond
Different from other of my lives but not so different because you are a part of it and them and these and this. We sleep because we love to dream and I talk in my sleep, say I love you with diligence, love like porcupine needles are sharp— that giant space porcupine whose quills the Great Astronaut plucked to weave the needlework of the universe! is how I love you. I’m incomprehensible in the...
“One of the gifts of the evening hours
is darkness, a velt screen between your...”
– Moira Egan, Vespers (via grammatolatry)
“There were always magpies
in the early morning
swinging from the clothesline...”
– John Kinsella and Dorothy Hewett, The Wild Things
“Is it an empty house, the body alone
with its weary old clothes
or its bullet...”
– Christopher Howell, Listen (via grammatolatry)
“Waking
on the train, I thought
we were attacked
by light: ...”
– Monica Youn, “Venice, Unaccompanied” (via grammatolatry)
Proper technique for removal of the heart from the...
The heart should be grasped by inserting the index finger into the left ventricle, the thumb in the right ventricle, and grasping the ventricular septum. Raise the heart towards the chin, putting a stretch on the blood vessels. Cut vessels one-by-one in a circular direction, beginning with either the inferior vena cava or lower pulmonary vein.
-Henry W. Cattell, Postmortem Pathology, 1906
This Is Not an Elegy | Catherine Pierce
At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant, my fingernails chewed to half-moons. I took off my clothes in a late March field. I had secret car wrecks, secret hysteria. I opened my mouth to swallow stars. In backseats I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust, and distance. I was unformed and total. I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops stopped coming around. The heat lifted its palms. The radio...
Where the Lover Cannot Let Go of an Old Love (&...
“Where the Lover Cannot Let Go of an Old Love (& Chooses to Remain In Those Memories)” based on Richard Siken’s “The Long and Short of It”
“I grew up watching your hands
arrange space,
so I find it very natural
that...”
– Dorothea Grossman (via rosiee)
Lenox Aubade
for Amy Clampitt
I grew my hair out in a depression. Let it knot into a forum for the birds in my thoughts, sparked into actuality in the wee dark. What wills them awake? An early sentry, then the rest beckoning? Coordinates rising when stars in the lifting night are falling. Letting them nest, I felt their joy accumulate, until...
grammatolatry:
“Because I mistrust my head & hands, because I know salt tinctures my songs, I tried hard not to touch you even as I pulled you into my arms. Seasons sprouted & went to seed as we circled the dance with silver cat bells tied to our feet. Now, kissing you, I am the archheir of second chances. Because I know twelve ways to be wrong & two to be good, I was wounded by the...