lavender literature

Tuck me into the soil gently,

Our first kiss wasn’t behind the high school. Not in the movie theater’s back row. Not after the first breakdown. It went like this: Me, released from the hospitaljail with a fresh prescription, one bag packed, staying at a friend’s house, with no exit plan or exist plan. Walking the length of a concrete road, I turned & asked: Has it been cloudy for days — ­ & the sun just came out? She said: No, Shira. It’s been sunny all week. So then. It was your sudden mouth. Your broom that swept the sky of its minor chord. There’s no metaphor here. When I looked up, I saw the sun

“Can we love without greed? Without wanting to be first?”

“You do not know / How little I loved / Before I loved you.”

“The shortest poem is a name.”

“Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.”

i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence.

“For the vast majority of people,” my mother said, just before she died, “The thing that’s going to kill you is already on the inside.”

“The name of a person you love is more than language–”

“Fairy tales are more than moral lessons and time capsules for cultural commentary; they are natural law. The child raised on folklore will quickly learn the rules of crossroads and lakes, mirrors and mushroom rings. They’ll never eat or drink of a strange harvest or insult an old woman or fritter away their name as though there’s no power in it. They’ll never underestimate the youngest son or touch anyone’s hairpin or rosebush or bed without asking, and their steps through the woods will be light and unpresumptuous. Little ones who seek out fairy tales are taught to be shrewd and courteous citizens of the seen world, just in case the unseen one ever bleeds over.”