firstfullmoon

[firstfullmoon]

“Are you there? Are you soaked in dreams still? […] Did I say the light was touching everything?”

— Robert Hass, from “July Notebook: The Birds,” The Apple Trees at Olema

[firstfullmoon]

Alice Notley in The Paris Review (1970)

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Tishani Doshi

[firstfullmoon]

From "The Palace" by Kaveh Akbar

Read the whole poem here. And read Kaveh's beautiful novel Martyr! while you're at it... the ending had me sobbing.

[firstfullmoon]

Alice Notley

[firstfullmoon]

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?” In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said. At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets. All day I listen to the radio of your memories. Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less. When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials. Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you. One day you will understand. One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited. There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning. I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.  Do you understand? It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop. It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.

love letter from the afterlife, andrea gibson

[firstfullmoon]

Bound (Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski, 1996)

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“When we say cliché, stereotype, trite pseudoelegant phrase, and so on, we imply, among other things, that when used for the first time in literature the phrase was original and had a vivid meaning. In fact, it became hackneyed because its meaning was at first vivid and neat, and attractive, and so the phrase was used over and over again until it became a stereotype, a cliché. We can thus define clichés as bits of dead prose and of rotting poetry.”

— Vladimir Nabokov drops this brilliant bit of insight roughly half way through his lecture on James Joyce’s Ulysses, the last of his in Lectures on Literature.

[firstfullmoon]

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

— Robert Frost - from a letter to Louis Untermeyer (1 January 1916)

[firstfullmoon]

“[Art] should prepare us for tenderness. And in this regard it starts, I think, with intention… Our intention is to crack life open for just a second.”

— Anton Chekhov

[firstfullmoon]

Crackerbell, Mary Ruefle

[firstfullmoon]

9 June 1939 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

[firstfullmoon]

What Is Otherwise Infinite by Bianca Stone

[firstfullmoon]

so it’s a wednesday night in july and you’re at home and you’ve showered and you’ve masturbated and you’ve gnawed at the inside of your mouth and you’ve eaten and washed the dishes and fixed a corner of the fitted sheet on your bed and texted your grandmother and thought positive thoughts and still the feeling comes. what then

[firstfullmoon]

ohmygod i did not know you are grieftolight

its all me babyyyyy

[firstfullmoon]

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

[firstfullmoon]

Could you please remind me from where comes ‘and then where else could you be but in love’? I went looking for that again months ago but I cannot find where I first saw that I just remember enjoying it. 🐚

its from I think love is something that happens to other people by michael gray bulla !