show me a sky

— Nikos Kazantzakis, tr. by Carl Wildman, from “Zorba the Greek,” wr. c. 1946

Powerless Quotes by Lauren Roberts

Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence // Ada Limón, "Lies About Sea Creatures" // Sherita Walker // @itsbaditsgood // Richard Siken, "I Had a Dream About You" // Richard Siken, "You Are Jeff" (8) // Richard Siken, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" // @_demarmol on Instagram // Anne Sexton, "The Touch"

if anyone is interested, the book is I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (1996[1988]) by Lee Maracle, and it's really really good so far!

I have memorized the geometry of shadows cast by a stack of unread giants, waiting for a spine to crack and bleed a gospel I can actually use. But the ink is dry. The paper, just dead wood mottled with the ego of men long buried. Cynicism is an art, and I am its naive expert, practicing the habit of preempting the bruise, sharpening my tongue into a scalpel to peel back my own chest and laugh at the wet, thumping mess of it. “Look,” I tell the dark, “how pathetic to want." "How embarrassing to be made of glass in a room full of stones.” Craving the honest as winter something to strip the skin and leave the bone, because truth is softer than I admit, a suffocating thing. I am a failure of a cynic because I still have the nerve to be haunted. I am a poet only because I don’t know how to bleed without checking the light, to see if the red looks pretty on the floor.

this is a poem

i couldn’t not draw this

Middle age by Jason Shinder

and its a major impediment to effectively combating these ideas, because if you concede their premises, you have already given ground to your enemies.

ok real