ikarosisflying

[ikarosisflying]

[ikarosisflying]

“I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience—bring words close to the body—as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch, from The Chronology of Water

[ikarosisflying]

- Margaret Atwood, Fox/Fire Song.

[ikarosisflying]

Richard Hugo, Essay on Poetic Theory: The Triggering Town

[ikarosisflying]

Anita Olivia Koester, from “Constellation in a Cornell Box”

[ikarosisflying]

lucille clifton

[ikarosisflying]

CHRYSOPOETICS I. the world ends softly— systole, then the sudden absence of answer. II. the sky burns in pieces—Beijing first, then Bangkok. The news is full of men and women in surgical masks, suitcoats rimed ash-white. Children are being kept inside, it informs, but you catch round faces at the edge of camera frames, small noses pressed against windows. (how to explain Armageddon to those little grigori, wide-eyed and guiltless?) your town gets hit between Nashville and Kansas City, a few chill-sharp hours before dawn. you stand in the gathering white, death dusting your eyelashes. it’s getting harder to breathe. III. the cities flicker, fall dark. The nights become silvercold bright; the milky way a Jacob’s Ladder—ascending, ascending, and impassible. Sometimes you see dark shapes pass across the constellations, slipping from empty to emptiness. Their wings blot out the stars. IV. you forget how to sing. you forget what it was for. V. you count your ribs one morning—trace the crescive struts of them with your ever-lengthening nails. There is blood in your teeth you did not put there; war rides a burned-out red mustang, and his mouth tastes like the wrong end of a bullet. The pale rider sits on the end of your bed at night, carving and sealing shem into your skull, whispering, the harvest is past. Under the bloated sun, you tear down the last gods. It is not enough, this slow monstering— you have remembered the apple still lodged in your throat and you are not saved. VI. the angels come too late, feathers crawling with mites and eyes flat as snakes’. The smell of ozone lingers in their skin, and glory glory glory sounds like a punchline. They promise altars and arks; the hollow earth, the ascending light. You will be gold, and gold again. You are not surprised when their throats are torn open, revealed to be hollow. VII. it is cold here at the end of all ages.

by notbecauseofvictories (via notbecauseofvictories)

[ikarosisflying]

Dorothy Allison, from Boston, Massachusetts (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983)

[ikarosisflying]

“No. / Poetry is not harmless.”

— — Sandra Simonds, from Atopia

[ikarosisflying]

Catch a Body by Ilse Bendorf

[ikarosisflying]

There is a lion in my living room. I feed it raw meat / so it does not hurt me. It is a strange thing / to nourish what could kill you / in the hopes it does not kill you. / We have lived like this, it and I, for so many years. / Sometimes it feels like we have always lived like this. / Sometimes I think I have always been like this.

The Lion, Clementine von Radics (via clementinevonradics)

[ikarosisflying]

There are endings so sad I want the morning light to scourge the fields. Endings that are only what the river dreams when it dries up.

Richard Jackson, from Alternate Endings (via nemophilies)

[ikarosisflying]

He tells her that the Earth is flat— / He knows the facts, and that is that. / In altercations fierce and long / She tries her best to prove him wrong. / But he has learned to argue well. / He calls her arguments unsound / And often asks her not to yell. / She cannot win. He stands his ground. / The planet goes on being round.

Wendy Cope (via queenshulamit)

[ikarosisflying]

your name is EVE and you live in the GARDEN of EDEN. Your life is PRETTY GRAND and you WANT for NOTHING, and all you taste is SWEET; still, you feel as though there is MORE. What will you choose - BLISS or FREEDOM? > EAT THE FRUIT? — Your name is HELEN and you live in the KINGDOM of BATTLES You are a QUEEN and you are OUTRAGEOUSLY BEAUTIFUL, still, your KISS is heavy with WAR and not LOVE You’ve been careful your whole life, and there is no REWARD What will you choose - PEACE or FREEDOM? > BOARD THE SHIP? — Your name is GUINEVERE and you live in a HOLY LAND Your PAST is worth a PENNY and your PRESENT worth a CROWN, still, all that’s YOURS is only YOURSELF. Your husband has no use for it, but it is all you have to GIVE. What will you choose - FAITH or FREEDOM?  > FOLLOW LANCELOT? — Your name is OPHELIA and you live in NOTHINGNESS Everything is FALLEN APART and everything is LOST. FLOWERS and DEATH are SYNONYMOUS, still, men talk of a HAPPY END. What will you choose - HOPE or FREEDOM? > CLIMB THE WILLOW? — Your name is SUSAN and you do not live in NARNIA You were once a SAVIOR and a WARRIOR and now they say you are JUST a GIRL. They are WRONG. You have never been ‘just’ anything. What will you choose - NOSTALGIA or FREEDOM? > LOSE YOUR TRAIN TICKET?

[ RPGs, or relentlessly persistent girls ] h.e.h. (via cassandrha)

[ikarosisflying]

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems, 1965-1975 (via hellanne)

[ikarosisflying]

He took everything from me and then came back to take my ability to tell anyone what had been taken.

[ikarosisflying]

The quiet transition from Autumn to Winter is not a bad time at all. It’s nice to gather everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow into a deep core of safety where you can defend what is your very own, and laugh at the storms and darkness outside.

Tove Jansson (via whatagrump)