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poetry recommendations for january

I Am Offering this Poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca

The New Decade by Hieu Minh Nguyen

Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors by Richard Siken

I Want to Write Something So Simply by Mary Oliver

Having a Coke with You by Frank O'Hara

Shokushu Goukan for the Cyborg Soul by Franny Choi

Untitled by James Baldwin

What’s Not to Love by Brendan Constantine

The Horse Fell Off the Poem by Mahmoud Darwish

The Crunch by Charles Bukowski

The Touch by Anne Sexton

i love you to the moon & by Chen Chen

Winter by Chen Chen

buy me a coffee

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"Villain era," I hiccup between sobs as I'm forced to assert basic boundaries for my mental well being.

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You know, when I see fictional characters who repress all their emotions, they're usually aloof and very blunt about keeping people at a distance, sometimes to an edgy degree—but what I don't see nearly enough are the emotionally repressed characters who are just…mellow.

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

…they've never actually told you anything about themselves.

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Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

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by james_ratchford_photography

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Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

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A book is an immortal.

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— Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

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you ever read a story where you and the protagonist share such a specific brand of mental illness that you feel like you've been smacked with a mirror and you just gotta sit there with wet eyes as it lists all the ways you need to fix yourself. stories that say "this you? get help lmao". stories that equal six months of therapy. self recognition through the other? shoot that shit up my veins all day every day

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Jasmin Lee Cori, The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect

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It might be a betrayal of the worst kind but I no longer care what u think mother. Your words don't hold the same power over me. I thought you had life figured out, that I could never go astray if I followed your advice. But the ideas and beliefs you've taught me have been inadequate to explain my reality, my experiences, my pain. When I try to make you understand, you look like I'm speaking a different language. It's like applying the grammatical rules of Urdu to English. Or using critical thinking to appraise religion. The difference between blaming others and blaming God. Neither is right, neither is wrong, the two of us are just living in separate worlds.

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My whole body ignites , nerve endings on fire from every harsh word. This is why I'd rather be deaf. Yet it also feels good to hear something occasionally, even a loud screech.

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― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (Book 1)

[text ID: A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person.]

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗

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St. Hansbål (also known as Midsummer Night Bonfire) Nicolai Astrup - Date unknown Private collection Print - woodcut Height: 60 cm (23.62 in.), Width: 66 cm (25.98 in.)

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You wake up feeling like a stranger in an alien, unexplored world. Maybe you were someone else in your dreams (a fuller person and less of an empty husk).

You think of how easy it would be to sink back into oblivion but your survival instinct fights the feeling (fights, fights, fails, gets back up).

You asked your old roommate to wake you up on call, you were getting used to someone else pulling you up from that gravity, hauling you from the quagmire. You know one can't depend on an anchor to save a ship that throws itself against rocks. (You appreciate the 2 second shared intimacy of being in the same groggy state.)

You go on Twitter first thing in the morning even though you shouldn't because one really needs a reason, any reason (ends up making u feel worse, too many voices). You pivot to tumblr and a slightly messy kitchen layout evokes a homely feeling, a feeling more alien than the one you woke up with. You hear the loud voices of the cleaning staff that would normally irk you, it melts into your chest in a comforting way. You imagine a blaring television in the clinical anonymity of a shared public space, reminiscent of the childhood background noise of your happier days. (a soft mirage in a chaotic sea is enough to want to stay afloat at times)

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I don’t need it to be easy, I need it to be worth it. – Lil Wayne