Just Thinking Of How Our Meaning Or Purpose In Life Is Merely To Experience. Eating An Orange Segment,

are there any poems you have on home, if its ok to ask? i feel homesick for a home beyond my reach and thought i could come to you.

“I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

“it’s as if I had to go back home on foot, alone, barefoot not knowing where far away, everybody else went long ago”

— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic)

“[ON LOSING LOVE]: This is the model I propose. You are arriving home and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart shaped.”

— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters

— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“‘I’m homesick all the time,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I just don’t know where home is. There’s this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it’s like chasing the moon - just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again.”

— Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon 

“Wickedness has leaked into the home I made, / and I want to burn it down. Sister, tell me / how you stand the murderous fury. You there / still singing, I crave demolishing, to eat / explosives.”

— Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “Home Fires”

“At the core of all sighs is a name, a stone from the body’s last lost home.”

— Karen Solie, from “Days Inn,” Short Haul Engine

“To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad?”

— Chen Chen, from “Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet”

“Feeling what we all feel: home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.”

— Richard Blanco, from “Mexican Almuerzo in New England”

— Ross Gay, from Bringing the Shovel Down; “Because”

“I want to ask was there ever one / moment when all of it relented, / when rain and ocean and their own / sense of home were revealed to them / as one and the same?”

— Eavan Boland, from In a Time of Violence

“I: Why not take the shorter way home. HT: There is no shorter way home.”

— Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours; “Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)”

Could things have gone any other way?

summer’s almost over so here’s some summer themed drawings~

You don’t need to have dated someone to know dating isn’t for you!

You don’t need to have had sex to know it isn’t for you!

You know yourself better than anyone else! I trust you, and you trust you!

“I sit here alone, burning,”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Yannis Stavridakis c. December 1917

1. bathe by hailaker

2. art by maggie stephenson

3. ocean vuong, night sky with exit wounds

4. art by charlotte ager

5. banana yoshimoto, goodbye tsugumi

being asexual with a lot of aesthetic attraction is like no i dont wanna fuck you im just gonna keep stealing glances and accidently walk into a door

a dialogue between the unloved and the loving

neil hilborn // miranda july // @orpheuslament // aaron o’hanlon // georges bataille // georges bataille “my mother/madame edwarda/the dead man” // @khariyaha // natalie wee “least of all” // @fridayiminlovemp3 // maria petrovykh “love me. i am pitch black” // “the seven husbands of evelyn hugo” // sylvia plath “johnny panic & the bible of dreams” // mary oliver “wild geese” // sue zhao // virginia woolf from a letter to katherine mansfield // trista mateer

[ID: a collection of excerpts of text.

..saying goodbye. yes, there is a place where someone loves you both before and after they learn what you are.”

“finally, in a low whisper, he said, “i think i might be a terrible person.” for a split second i believed him - i thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. then i realized that we all think we might be terrible people. but we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”

screaming take me as I am or kill me / screaming peel my skin off like a blindfold / screaming love me despite the horror / screaming please, God, love me because of it.

“show me your thorns and i’ll show you hands ready to bleed.”

“i don’t want your love unless you know i’m repulsive and love me as you know it”

People always think we look for love at our lowest to distract us. I am convinced we do it because we want someone to look us in the eye, to look our ugly in the eye and still choose us. I didn’t want a distraction, (highlighted) I wanted you to see a mess and still find me worthy of love, to tell me that you could still love me anyway. (end highlight)

“i kneel into a dream where i / am good & loved. i am good. / i am loved. my hands have made / some good mistakes. they can always / make better ones.

 capitalized letters that look like they’ve been cut and pasted on top of overhead pictures of fields. it reads: “tell me every terrible thing you ever did / and let me love you anyway.”

love me. i am pitch black, / sinful, blind, confused. / but if not you, then who else / is going to love me?

“if you are intolerable, let me be the one to tolerate you,” i said, and then i kissed her and tasted the lemon juice on her lips.

“you have seen the rotten streak in me and you have come back, no matter how bad it was. you have always come back. can’t you see? you have taken me always as I am, no matter what.”

“i wish you wouldn’t look at me like that.” “like what?” “i don’t know,” she hesitated. “like you could love me.”

“i love you, and i am conscious of you all the time.”

in this space right here that we have made for each other, you can say anything and i will not abandon you. unwrap the worst things you have done. watch me hold them up to the light and not even flinch. 

 end of ID]

it astounds me even until now how i can come to this blog and go with a piece of my soul back in place. i was wondering if you had any poems on 'ghosts' and their 'haunting' people and places, romantic or otherwise. there is a ghost, you see, and she haunts me even though i know her to be alive and well. i am unsure of which terrifies me more: her being in and out of my reach or my hope that i too am her ghost.

so these are not all poems, but:

“I think ghosts are memory—memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together. Ghosts are that which return and return and return. The body has its own hauntings, too: phantom limb sensation, organ transfer memory, the traumatic self. And others.”

— Shastra Deo, interviewed by Sumudu Samarawickrama in Liminal Mag 

— Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

“But the fall—the falling / of it / even after it’s done—”

— Jorie Graham, from Overlord: Poems; “Omaha (Lowest Tide, Coefficient 105, Full Moon)”

— Jessie Lynn McMains, To Be Haunted

— Dorothy Allison, from Boston, Massachusetts (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983)

“it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing / to shy from, this is not / nostalgia, you must look at it,”

— Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Gently, Though, Gentle”

— Nikki Giovanni, from “[Untitled]”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

— Adonis, from Selected Poems; “A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

—James Baldwin, from Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems; “Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico)”