split your lip for tenderness

Mary Oliver, "Thirst" from Devotions

[Text ID: I could be a liar. I could be remembering / the wrong details. Details. Details: her office is still / a lost thing. Darkness holding the ember hostage. / There is nothing in this story that’s not a dagger.]

Catherine Pierce

— Stephanie Burt, from "Prayer for Werewolves," We Are Mermaids

i was sixteen for twenty years

— Sunrise, by Louise Glück

[Text ID: “I got cursed, in every way a / woman can. / You kill yourself, over and over, / to be different.”]

catastrophe is next to godliness by franny choi

on choosing kindness. again and again.

restful dream 

“want” from cold river: poems by joan larkin, october 1997 

Mary Oliver

Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over. Like a taxidermied grizzly in the student union. You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear. That time with him in Houston. Sometimes you flame into a scary flower. An eruption of coherence in the postmodern seminar. You stand in a shallow creek and your reflection floats slowly downstream without you. Alcohol is your emotional-support animal. The fan hums erratically. An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the baggage carrousel. Like an amoeba without an e-scooter. An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-Equity horse. You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel. A Zen koan growing in the White House Rose Garden. Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of an abandoned friendship. You’re the queen, but you’re a bee being swept into the pool’s filtration system. Like a version, touched for the very last time. Spooky piano music rising from the dishwater. You wake up alone to a bird reciting Keats.