mortalpractice
the miracle repeats
I read a lot of poetry.mobile menu: favorites | complete | excerpts
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Quote
I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger
Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club
(via 89words)
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“Behind me, not whispering, but low, his voice spills down my collar… and I’m not prepared for it, not braced, not ready for the unshaven fall of it, for the red ivy crawl of it down my spine. I am wet wood thrown in the flames when he says my name. I am taken apart by his tone, I am smoking all over, I want to be split open by that voice, I want to be bent over and driven in that fire.”
— Peregrine
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The Maze
Mary-Kim Arnold
I dislike uncertainty. Take no pleasure in the element of surprise.
I’ll carry the clipboard and checklists around
at my own birthday party. No need to leave anything to chance.
It was my son’s idea of course. There was a plastic pirate out front
and the promise of treasure at the end. I paid, then
shuffled behind, his voice ringing out, follow me—
All glass and mirrors. I saw myself reflected a thousand times
all of them weary, impatient. Some days motherhood is just
din and obstacle. I was thinking about
the letter I had received. Another dead end
in my family search. No contact information, no forwarding address.
No one—no one—had been looking for me.
At a certain point, I stopped trying. Extended my arms and felt
along the walls for edges. It was cheating maybe but plodding along
without pleasure or intent doesn’t get you to the end any faster.
It’s been forty-five years. My mother, my father, they
are not getting any younger. Perhaps I waited too long. Perhaps
if I had started earlier there would have been other options. Other
people to reach out to. I read once in my file that I had
a “very good memory,” that I memorized the names
of all the neighborhood dogs. I would like to know them now.
I saw him before he saw me. He was looking around and pacing
not panicked yet but on the verge. I stopped and watched him for as long
as I thought he could bear. He turned when I emerged at last
and ran up and showed me the flag he had won
for making it through first. You were so slow, he told me. It was so
easy. Next time, don’t take so long.
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a few words for joan
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It ends or it doesn’t.
That’s what you say. That’s
how you get through it.
The tunnel, the night,
the pain, the love.
It ends or it doesn’t.
If the sun never comes up,
you find a way to live
without it.
If they don’t come back,
you sleep in the middle of the bed,
learn how to make enough coffee
for yourself alone.
Adapt. Adjust.
It ends or it doesn’t.
It ends or it doesn’t.
We do not perish.
Caitlyn Siehl, It Ends or it Doesn’t (via jakeperaltas)
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Island in the Sky
i got your letter
still warm
arrived by hummingbird
early this morning
postmarked
with a sigh
from the island in the sky
jk
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Tell me what I can take
�� away from this forgetting, why
I overlook my body, latching
onto the blues the nighttime makes,
how I avoid the light, my past,
and disappear into the grass.
— Stephanie Rogers, from “Fat Girl Trilonnet,” Fat Girl Forms
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waves lick the sand like an obedient lover
— Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, from "Apricot Begonias," published in NYU Black Renaissance Noire
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Watch the body bend and curve watch it shutter watch the body an endless aching fire giving twin souls back to soil
— Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, from "Apricot Begonias," published in NYU Black Renaissance Noire
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I open myself
& let out
a dawdling roar.
a prehistoric yawn.
I am comfy as
bonfire. as
winter’s moon nude
on a tiger skin rug.
I am cold & crawling.
kitten in a lake
last minute
before drowning.
this bedroom has
creaking floors
& honed images
of giant jaws below.
milk for breakfast.
I visualize it.
I slurp. I plunge
into sleep. smilodon
smilodon. hiding
& waiting. still sheathed
into the last
american glacier.
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Michael Frazier, “Irrational Fear of Home”
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Noriko Ibaragi, “Room” translated by Peter Robinson and Andrew Houwen
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[C]rystal blue is your gaze,
and the water of the heart dawns fresh;
you easily remove the soot that man cakes on things,
and you understand the world from your own pain,
because you already know
that over all the eyes of the earth
someday, in disconsolation, it rains.
Enriqueta Ochoa, from “Marianne,” Bitter Oleander (vol. 27, no. 2, Autumn 2021)
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It’s alright to overdress for the riot. Your rage is stunning.
It’s alright to pursue the wrong pleasures and the right suffering.
Here’s my permission. Take it. It’s alright to replace a siren
with a bell. Your emergency should make its music.
Traci Brimhall, “Contender,” from Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
(via bostonpoetryslam)
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Insomnia
All night my fear like a candle
not bright enough
or hot enough
to do much damage
but ambient
flickering and spitting
a thick wisp of black smoke
licking the ceiling:
dreams of my undoing.
— Amanda Moore, from Requeening
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tonight’s sharon olds poem
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Imagine this: you are the lover sitting on a wooden bench staring out at the city and the sea. You have been waiting for a long time. You watched the sky empty to become what it is now: blameless and blue. The Artist approaches you from behind; she wraps her hands around your face; she covers your eyes with her fingers. Guess Who? She whispers. She runs her fingers down your face, lets them settle on your lips. You bite at her index finger. Who? you say. You, you, you.
Nicole Callihan, from “The Viewer,” The Deeply Flawed Human (Deadly Chaps Press, 2016)
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