Elsa Bleda (French-Turkish, b. 1988, Aix-les Bains, France, based Johannesburg, South Africa) - Istanbul At Night from the Nightscapes series, 2016, Photography
it astounds me even until now how i can come to this blog and go with a piece of my soul back in place. i was wondering if you had any poems on 'ghosts' and their 'haunting' people and places, romantic or otherwise. there is a ghost, you see, and she haunts me even though i know her to be alive and well. i am unsure of which terrifies me more: her being in and out of my reach or my hope that i too am her ghost.
so these are not all poems, but:
“I think ghosts are memory—memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together. Ghosts are that which return and return and return. The body has its own hauntings, too: phantom limb sensation, organ transfer memory, the traumatic self. And others.”
— Shastra Deo, interviewed by Sumudu Samarawickrama in Liminal Mag
— Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)
— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander
“But the fall—the falling / of it / even after it’s done—”
— Jorie Graham, from Overlord: Poems; “Omaha (Lowest Tide, Coefficient 105, Full Moon)”
— Jessie Lynn McMains, To Be Haunted
— Dorothy Allison, from Boston, Massachusetts (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983)
“it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing / to shy from, this is not / nostalgia, you must look at it,”
— Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Gently, Though, Gentle”
— Nikki Giovanni, from “[Untitled]”
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
— Adonis, from Selected Poems; “A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)
—James Baldwin, from Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems; “Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico)”
“I speak to myself all the time, like a crazed woman on the streets. Sometimes I sob at train stations and wonder—will someone console me? But eyes mostly glaze and flicker like hummingbirds, quickly away. And what can be said about darkness after all?”
— Tishani Doshi, “Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras,” from Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
“One day,’ you said, ‘I watched the sunset forty-three times!’ And a little later you added: 'You know, when one is that sad, one can get to love the sunset.’
Tình cảm là thứ phải vượt qua nhiều chuyện mới biết được thực sự nó là gì. Rong ruổi nói cười với nhau một thời để rồi nhiều lúc kể lại về nhau trong những câu chuyện cũng vẫn gói nhau vào một chữ “cũ” mà thôi.
Đời có ai đếm xuể có bao nhiêu cái đã cũ. Có cái cũ đi thì trôi vào quên lãng, có cãi đã trở nên cũ rồi người ta mới biết trân trọng...
Tự hỏi, đến bao giờ mới tìm được thứ không bao giờ cũ đi trong đời.