Angels and Moths / Olena Kalytiak Davis

If a man once loved you,
he’s turned you into a moth.

That’s how he’ll remember
the flutter: that numinous,
that beating, that winged.

Angels and moths:
that’s who men love.

But I don’t recollect like that.
I don’t think I ever loved
that gently. And I’ve never
flown toward a burning
house, hoping, maybe
my faith lay in that
single thing left,
in that smoldering filigree.
I never reminisce
a sorrow that delicately shaped.

But sometimes I feel someone remembering
me that way: translucent,
crazy, awake only at night.
He’s regretting his fingertips
were not wide or soft enough.
He’s mourning me now.
He’s imagining me eating away
at someone else’s light.

And that’s perfect.
That’s exactly how
he always wanted to love
me. My wings, 
my hair-like antennae
hanging;
my frenulum
between his forefinger
and his thumb.

A Name by Ada Limón

toriethevampireslayer:

When Eve walked among the animals and named them—
nightingale, redshouldered hawk, fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted them to speak back, looked into their wide wonderful eyes and whispered, Name me, name me.

“When Leather is a Whip” By Martín Espada

At night,

with my wife

sitting on the bed,

I turn from her

to unbuckle

my belt

so she won’t see

her father

unbuckling

his belt

(Source: travels-, via blackmormon)

“Love Poem” By Richard Brautigan

it’s so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don’t love them
any more.

“Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich,—yes, richer than a king,—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

“The Shout” by Simon Armitage

We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face

I don’t remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell’s Farm —
I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

(via ohmyemilyjane)

“Tattoo” by Todd Davis

Try telling the boy who’s just had his girlfriend’s name
cut into his arm that there’s slippage between the signifier
and the signified. Or better yet explain to the girl
who watched in the mirror as the tattoo artist stitched
the word for her father’s name (on earth as in heaven)
across her back that words aren’t made of flesh and blood,
that they don’t bite the skin. Language is the animal
we’ve trained to pick up the scent of meaning. It’s why
when the boy hears his father yelling at the door
he sends the dog that he’s kept hungry, that he’s kicked,
then loved, to attack the man, to show him that every word
has a consequence, that language, when used right, hurts.

“Fact” by Charles Bukowski

careful poetry
and careful
people
last
only long
enough
to
die
safely.

“Embrace” by Billy Collins

You know the parlor trick.

wrap your arms around your own body

and from the back it looks like

someone is embracing you

her hands grasping your shirt

her fingernails teasing your neck

from the front it is another story

you never looked so alone

your crossed elbows and screwy grin

you could be waiting for a tailor

to fit you with a straight jacket

one that would hold you really tight.

THIS IS SO GOD DAMNED BEAUTIFUL, I ALMOST CRIED. PLEASE READ IT.

“What I Never Told You About the Abortion”
Alison Townsend

That it hurt, despite the anesthetic,
which they administered with a long needle, shot straight into the womb.

That they hit the vagus nerve the first time and I fell down when I tried to stand.
That after the second shot my legs snapped shut—

instinctively as any wild mother protecting chick, kit, cub.
That I held the hand of a young Hispanic nurse and wept

when she said, “You know, hon, you don’t have to do this.”
That I believed I did, though I nearly got up and left.

That the doctor was crude, saying (when he saw me conscious),
“It’s always the ones who want to be awake who should be put out.”

That dilation and curettage is exactly what it sounds like:
opening, scraping, digging out a scrap of tissue that clings.

That mothers both create and take life. That I crossed a picket line

to get into the clinic. That I wanted to come back another day

Read More

Sometimes | Nikki Giovanni

sometimes
when i wake up
in the morning
and see all the faces
i just can’t
breathe

The moon was a backyard | Anis Mojgani

we were hands
making fists
around fistfuls of black hair
fistfuls so thick they were bushels
hair so black the night looked small
and hands clinched so tightly
that God Himself could see
we all were scared
and blind
and little

Love Letter by Melissa Stein

I don’t know when the boys

began to walk away with parts of myself

in their sticky hands;when loving

became a process of subtraction.Or why,

having given up what seems so much,

I’m willing to lose even more — erasing

all this body’s known, relearning it with you.