i hope the anonymous person who sent the "i used to live in your house. i'm drunk in boston and it's the only address i know. happy holidays" postcard is aware that they wrote my favourite poem

Ocean Vuong, from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

jessczapalskipoetry

Anis Mojgani, “To the Sea”

i think my problem is that i mourn things even before they arrive to me. before i even know it exists i expect it to be gone. and that leads into a life without safety, a life without giving in to the present.

“Desire, I think, is a portal where we look at the thing we want, but we also look at the other things that are gathered around that. And I don’t think I know of any better vehicle for holding all that together than poetry. In the lines of poetry, there’s so much said and so much implied, so much lurking in the silence of a poem and so much present in the text of it.”

— Pádraig Ó Tuama, from the Poetry Unbound Podcast, “Yu Xiuhua | Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You”

i made a little quiz. it has gentle wisdom to take with you. whatever i can give you is yours. love u. take the wisdom & run.

Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream; “The Complex Sentence”

1963 Orange Crop frozen punch

you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

Jill McDonough, “Love and the Deli Counter”

i go out → i lock eyes with someone beautiful → i fall in love → i leave → my heart breaks forever

“We lived suspended in a soup, a depression so narrow and so deep we didn't even recognize we were feeling it. There was a horrible stasis in the air and our lives. We stood still in the stillness of time. It was like being in a plane that was slowly twirling to the ground. Did you look at the other people, or did you not look? Did you hold someone's hand and tell them, I love you, even if you'd only just met? Or did you squeeze your eyes shut and think of your loved ones, or think about your past, or pray? We were scuttling between these strategies like little bugs — sometimes praying, sometimes squeezing our eyes shut, sometimes thinking about the past, and sometimes saying I love you to a person we'd only just met — as civilization twirled all the way down. And apparently all the water had plastic in it, even the safe water that came in plastic bottles.

Were we the lucky ones, to have been chosen to live in this terrible time — to have been chosen to live in this heartbreaking time — as any moment in human civilization will break your heart, but none more so than the end?”

— Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

U can grieve and still live life. U can miss loving someone and love others. You can hold onto the good moments and simultaneously the bad moments. You can take the learning from a person you let go off and use it for the better. You can love someone and they may not be the right person. You can wish someone the best and love them from a distance. You can think fondly of someone and never talk to them again.. mysteries of the world…

i think it shld be more widespread for ppl to read aloud to each other as a means of spending time together. like even just a bunch of adults sitting together reading wikipedia articles or something

twitter is shadowbanning my tweet about the new essay because it includes a substack link and i guess elon musk hates that for some reason.