[YOUR FATHER/MY FATHER

Your father wakes up in the morning & his throat catches on fire. Your father says: "I am angry before I am alive." Your father wakes up in the morning and he is bleeding from his mouth. Your father guzzles down the blood like whiskey. He has always tended to the bottle. Your father wakes up in the morning and there are maggots all over his body. Your father does not wake up the next morning. He always felt more like a familiar body than a father. Your father is gone. The maggots aren't, though. ]

YOUR FATHER / MY FATHER by Mal Fawzy

— Frank O'Hara (via lunamonchtuna)

I know what it’s like to be afraid of something that may or may not happen. I know what it’s like to be preoccupied. I know what it’s like to put my quarters in the washing machine and forget if I ever took my dirty jeans out of the closet and put them in the bag to be washed. I know what it’s like to feel something both immense and vague while being engrossed in the specific. I know what it’s like to be scared that this life is my life. I know what it’s like to be scared that I am not who I am, or be scared that I am who I am. I know what it���s like, I am trying to say, to be alive when being alive means nothing more than being alive. The laundry every other week. The dread of what should not give me dread. The cold pizza on the counter. I haven’t called my mother in a long time.

— Devin Kelly, Ordinary Plots: Alicia Mountain’s “A Deer Mistaken for a Statue of a Deer”

How Festive the Ambulance, Kim Fu

[text descriptions:

1: You're my best friend / Now I have no one to tell / How I lost my best friend.

2: By the end, Tamino sings, 'No amount of fame will ever wash away the shame of knowing not how to love your only friend who will love you till the end", showing -.

3: I Still Forget We're Not Even Friends. / I still wake up / with things to / tell you.

4: I loved my friend. / He went away from me. / There's nothing more to say. / The poem ends, / Soft as it began, - / I loved my friend.

5: I can't explain the state that I'm in / The state of my heart, he was my best friend.

6: My friend is gone, he ran away / I can tell you, I love him each day.

/end descriptions]

mitski / tamino / trista mateer

palestinians poets: summer farah

summer farah is a palestinian american poet, editor, and critic. she is currently the outreach coordinator for the radius of arab american writers and sends out the occasional essay at evening conversations. she writes the poetry double features column at palette poetry, putting two collections in conversation each month.

IF YOU READ ONLY ONE PIECE BY SUMMER FARAH, MAKE IT THIS ONE: "the moon is pro-palestine"

OTHER POEMS ONLINE I LOVE BY SUMMER FARAH

"what it's called when israel destroys a palestinian village because there's allegedly an ancient jewish civilization under it" at sumuo mag

"noooo don’t be a birthright apologist you’re so sexy ahha" at bahr magazine // بحر issue 1

"at the met cloisters" at the rumpus

"for lorelai gilmore, cece parekh, & all the girls who take to the wilderness" at violet indigo blue etc

[id: a poem titled "having a meal with you", by charlotte. text is as follows:

will be more wonderful than a coke,

fresh and cold and icy in a chilled glass,

better than the sun on a spring afternoon,

when i am hopelessly- hopelessly!-

in love with you.

will be as good as the laughter

in the house, welling up and spilling

out of the kitchen and into the living room

and on and on and out the window.

and all of our drifting will have brought us

here, to this time and place, with

you and them and me, and we will be

home at last.

i would rather eat with you than

do anything else, really, especially

right now. especially right here.

and i understand what o'hara felt

except i feel it more.

end id.]

[text: Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.]

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

[id: a simple black and white diagram showing five steps to gutting a fish with text added.

in the top left, a whole fish has a dotted line on its belly indicating where to cut with a hand holding a knife poised next to it. in the top right, the belly has been sliced open and the knife is now making a cut beneath the head. in the middle left, one hande holds the fish head while another pulls its guts out. in the middle right, one hand holds the belly of the fish open while another scrapes it empty with a spoon. in the middle of the bottom, the gutted fish sits with its head and tail removed.

there is a line of text alongside each step. in order, they read:

A: I don't want to fall apart again.

B: I am unable to change.

C: I am falling apart.

D: can I ride this one out at least?

E: No. /end id]

jonny bolduc, “gut” 2015

[image description: a white license plate with green details and lettering in all caps. the top reads '1971' with the words 'live free or die' in between the numbers. the main text reads 'it just aint that simple'. the bottom text reads 'new hampshire. a thin green line borders the edges with another thin strip of white around it. /end description]

their license plates “live free or die” but it just aint that simple, it never was. // noah kahan

[image description:

image 1: [verse 2] / You're my best friend / Now I've no one to tell / How I lost my best friend.

image 2: I loved my friend. / He went away from me. / There's nothing more to say. The poem ends, / Soft as it began, - / I loved my friend.

/end description]

the frost by mitski // poem by langston hughes

it's my earnestly held belief that every human person holds within them an invisible timer that counts up from the last time they stuck their feet in a body of water and the higher that number gets the more sludge builds up in their brain and in their heart

my heart's full to the brim w the joy of loving btw. i'll die one day but also i won't. on account of the love.

You meet god and she's mostly dead fish. You ask her why and she says most of the world is dead fish, and she's made herself to appeal to the most common denominator, the everyman funnyman comedy show that runs for eleven seasons but with the entire universe in mind. You ask her how much of the dead fish is your fault, she says it's far less than you'd think, in the grand scheme of things. You ask her if you matter at all. If you can do anything. She shrugs her rotting shoulders and says mattering is a made-up concept, like life, but sure, you can matter if you want to, on some scale. She has many scales. She doesn't know what you mean by 'anything', but you can do everything you can. You ask her if it's enough. She says there's no base requirement for deserving to exist. She's smoking a joint and the smoke filtering out of her gills gathers and forms gas giants and red dwarfs. You ask her if there's any hidden secrets of the universe you should know and she says it's not a secret if she tells, plus it's fun to let you figure it out yourself. You ask her if any of your questions were right questions and she says you worry about being right so much it might keep you from fucking around, which is as close to meaning of life as she ever bothered to make. You don't ask but she says she loves your hair, also your whole being, also your planet. She says she figured out what love is yesterday and is trying it out, which explains the ten thousand rainbows and sudden influx in rains of fish. She offers you a drag of her joint and you wake up half past midnight behind a chain restaurant clutching a smoked salmon. The new stars are winking like they're in on some joke and you're sure if you try hard enough you'll remember what it is.

[text description:

(in bold) Ja

Ik heb je lief zoals je soms gelijk een gouden zomderdag bent

nee nee nee

ik heb je lief zoals je bent

nee nee

ik heb je lief zoals

nee

ik heb je lief

(italics) K. Schippers /end text description]