Empty your cup and throw your first time out the window.
I'm your new glass pillow
Drool on my hallowed edges
Search your fingers for my creases.
I am sculpted out of triumph and feebleness.
My vulnerability is your rest.
My body is not some vending machine with buttons to press to earn a refreshing drink
I am a landscape
An escape
A movie screen.
I am a new Chinatown to get lost in with foreign spaces and moans, and sounds.
I am cantankerous.
I am miraculous.
I am not to be fingered like a penny you've dropped between the cracks of the laundry machines, I am
Not. That. Boring.
I am the life of a butterfly,
Flicking, breathing, kissing
Whispering thank you to the mountaintops
For moving their rocks at the slightest tip of my wings.
I am to be fucked with glory
Bribed into being with exploration
Communicate
With my tectonic plates and ask my tides for permission.
Eat my curiosity, Alice
And let's go sailing.
I promise, darling,
We're only whale-watching.
About the Creator
Sarah Langthorne
Because anyone can poet, right?
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Foot Bindings
I asked my grandmother how she knew she'd fallen in love. I am not sure I ever did love him, she said. This was before I met my husband. I was naive, a naked spring, a raw nerve of a thing. That cannot ever be me, I knew. Sadness swept in gently like a Moscow thaw. It is no simple thing, looking into a woman's vast soul and seeing its foot bindings. Now, in Italy divorced with my skin singed off, when I say I don't love him mean: I have succeeded at feeling nothing most days and it mostly works. Do you want the comfort of Nothing? Do you want Nothing, too? Be warned: you'll never be free, even when you are nothing. Here is what doesn't work: Accepting the stages of grief. Talking about it. Sitting with the feeling. Missing him—no, the person you were when you believed in death do us part. Writing poetry. That, too. When I say I don't love him I mean: I feel capsized in an endless, starved tide. What sometimes works: selective memory. You must forget ripe tomatoes and his beard and feeling perfectly sheltered in a big blue world. Forget coffee in bed, laughter watching TV, blowing out the candles on the birthday cake and the quiet all-encompassing knowledge that you are chosen. Remember only how love turned to a banal everyday survival act, a trapeze act unsure whether he will catch you, how the warmth stagnated and became sour, remember the foot bindings and remember the resentment boiling in your veins as you stick it out for the kids. Six-hour Netflix binges help, too. A man's fingers tracing your spine. Frozen pizza at 2 a.m. Random trips to the museum just to stand near things that last a while. The realization that crying won’t change anything. Seeing that life is just a dream, and refusing to participate in your own suffering. Bite your fist. Walk on eggshells around joy. When I say I don't love him, I mean he didn’t break my heart, he just stopped touching it and it forgot how to beat right.
By Ella Bogdanovaabout 21 hours ago in Poets
The Lesions of Devotion
Every day I set myself down on the freshly cut lawn and strip myself bare. I take my guitar and finger the frets and pick at the strings, listening for dissonance. My life is dissonance. I twist the tuning pegs until each string sounds bright. Then I kneel, calves pointing behind me, kneecaps facing forward. All exposed to the breeze. I close my eyes and play the melody.
By Paul Stewart3 days ago in Fiction
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