smalltowngalsblog

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🌼 poems that set me free in april (even for a short while) 🌼

Stranger, an Armenian folk poem (from “Anthology of Armenian poetry")  

Dawn Does Not Break in the West, Eghishe Charenc (from “Anthology of Armenian poetry")  

Your Unripe Love, Paruyr Sevak (from “Anthology of Armenian poetry")

The Rope Looped Itself, Hamo Sahyan (from “Anthology of Armenian poetry”)

The Analysis of Yearning (Garod), Paruyr Sevak (from “Anthology of Armenian poetry")  

I Can Give Myself To Her by Yosano Akiko

“I was thinking…” by Elena Shvarts (tr. by Stephanie Sandler)

Love by Bob Hicok

Note for My Wall by Charles Bukowski

Here and Now by Peter Balakian

The Sound of Trees by Robert Frost

A Kind Of Loss by Ingeborg Bachmann

Excuses For Why We Failed At Love by Warsan Shire

‘One Heart’ by Franz Wright

Mayakovsky by Frank O'Hara

I Have a Terrible Cold by Fernando Pessoa

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340) by Emily Dickinson

Wet Evening in April by Patrick Kavanagh

You Who Never Arrived by Rainer Maria Rilke

For M by Mikko Harvey

“Little Crazy Love Song” by Mary Oliver

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Excuses For Why We Failed At Love by Warsan Shire I’m lonely so I do lonely things Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same. You hate women, just like your father and his father, so it runs in your blood. I was wandering the derelict car park of your heart looking for a ride home. You’re a ghost town I’m too patriotic to leave. I stay because you’re the beginning of the dream I want to remember. I didn’t call him back because he likes his girls voiceless. It’s not that he wants to be a liar; it’s just that he doesn’t know the truth. I couldn’t love you, you were a small war. We covered the smell of loss with jokes. I didn’t want to fail at love like our parents. You made the nomad in me build a house and stay. I’m not a dog. We were trying to prove our blood wrong. I was still lonely so I did even lonelier things. Yes, I’m insecure, but so was my mother and her mother. No, he loves me he just makes me cry a lot. He knows all of my secrets and still wants to kiss me. You were too cruel to love for a long time. It just didn’t work out. My dad walked out one afternoon and never came back. I can’t sleep because I can still taste him in my mouth. I cut him out at the root, he was my favorite tree, rotting, threatening the foundations of my home. The women in my family die waiting. Because I didn’t want to die waiting for you. I had to leave, I felt lonely when he held me. You’re the song I rewind until I know all the words and I feel sick. He sent me a text that said “I love you so bad.” His heart wasn’t as beautiful as his smile We emotionally manipulated one another until we thought it was love. Forgive me, I was lonely so I chose you. I’m a lover without a lover. I’m lovely and lonely. I belong deeply to myself .

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are u ever sick w longing. and i don't just mean romantic longing. i mean longing for a place you barely get to see, longing for friends you no longer have, longing for feelings you might have left behind in your childhood, longing for creativity, longing for a rich and more expansive life, longing for less inhibition. longing for more passion. longing for ur life to be so incandescent w something it thaws all the frost in ur bones. are u ever so consumed w it it rends ur heart in two. do u understand me

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On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers, Minda Honey

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The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan

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Sitting across the dinner table is a creature; she’s self made and held together with red twine, broken memories, and grandiosity. She’s waiting for her meal; a plate filled with white lies, falsities and omitted truths.

Once she’s done, she’ll pick her teeth; making sure to not miss a morsel that taste of false reality and tattered memories. Tomorrow she’ll be starving and greet me at this table again, waiting for her next meal.

I’m on the other side of the table; waiting for the day where she is finally full.

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It's world poetry day so here are some of my favorite poems:

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Night Walk by Franz Wright

Crossword by Lloyd Schwartz

The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

Love Train by Tomás Q. Morín

Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts by Mark Halliday

Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

in another string of the multiverse, perhaps by Michaella Batten

acknowledgments by Danez Smith

Death Wish by Josh Alex Baker

San Francisco by Richard Brautigan

How to Watch Your Brother Die by Michael Lassell

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life by Rebecca Hazelton

On Political(ized) Life by Kanika Lawton

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto

It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz

In Time by W.S. Merwin

It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib

Dear Life by Maya C. Popa

I Could Touch It by Ellen Bass

To The Young Who Want To Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón

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Rural Boys Watch The Apocalypse (rough draft) by Keaton St. James

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It's world poetry day so here are some (more) of my favorite poems:

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade by Brad Aaron Modlin

All Trains Are Going Local by Timothy Liu

Rural Boys Watch the Apocalypse by Keaton St. James (@boykeats)

HOPE YOU’RE WELL. PLEASE DON’T READ THIS. by Lev St. Valentine (@dogrotpdf)

Time of Love by Claribel Alegría

Every Job Has a First Day by Rebecca Gayle Howell

ALL THAT WANTING, RIGHT? by Devin Kelly

Reading by A.R. Ammons

things i want to ask you by Helga Floros

Night Bird by Danusha Laméris

Prayer for Werewolves by Stephanie Burt

The Two Times I Loved You the Most In a Car by Dorothea Grossman

The Yearner by Rachel Long

If I Had Three Lives by Sarah Russell

I Dream on a Crowded Subway Train with My Eyes Open But My Body Swaying by Chen Chen

We Have Not Long to Love by Tennessee Williams

Jesus at the Gay Bar by Jay Hulme

Cracks by Dieu Dinh

and here's part one <3

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What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

by Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

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I don't trust anyone who hasn't acknowledged their capacity for evil.

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Imagine that you and I shared a personal language, one that only we two could interpret.

Perhaps we do.

Communication (wikipedia) / The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin / Solaris (1972) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky / Ineffability (wikipedia) / Emma by Jane Austen / Solaris by Stanislaw Lem / Making Amends - panel 2 by Holly Warburton / To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf / Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb

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are u ever sick w longing. and i don't just mean romantic longing. i mean longing for a place you barely get to see, longing for friends you no longer have, longing for feelings you might have left behind in your childhood, longing for creativity, longing for a rich and more expansive life, longing for less inhibition. longing for more passion. longing for ur life to be so incandescent w something it thaws all the frost in ur bones. are u ever so consumed w it it rends ur heart in two. do u understand me

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crying because i call myself my dog's mom but i'm probably more like a sister to him and the way i love people is always spilling out over my hands in milk so yes i got told a lot you try too hard as a kid and i didn't know what that meant i just try to shove everything i care about under my wing and hold it there so every feather acts as an umbrella and if you're normal that's okay they'll say you're kind but if you're not normal it is a problem and someone who says they're an empath watched me fall down on the train and refused to give me the hand up

and yeah maybe i'm kind of bitter because every time i try to open up i only get to the bones of the thing before someone else takes up the whole room with meat and gristle and sparknotes of their own life painted in a pelt across my palms and just as i'm tryna clean up one mess another seems to pop up and it's really difficult to explain to your therapist that the problem is that you are too aware of the problem and that you keep fucking up and it's really difficult to explain to your partner i have no faith in the concept of love and life is a lot of sliding down these days, turn my body ice and moth, and that's okay! i am broken upside down like an egg and i am going to love you like an explosion and a star and a fucking galaxy! i'm gonna be too much

because god forbid you feel like me! god forbid you know what it's like! holy shit, god forbid. i'm gonna love you because i didn't get love. i'm gonna love you because otherwise the world is too cruel. i only live in the dark. maybe i'm a martyr. i think it's more like - i need to be right about this, about hope and trying and community. i'm going to be right about this, even if i need to set myself on fire to procure the warmth. come take it then, come latch on. i need you to be okay so someone is okay. so there's a reason i was born. i need it to work. i need to be shelter. a lighthouse. endlessly giving more.

i need to be. holy shit, god forbid. i can't live in a world that's only storm.

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even when i'm alone, i've always felt this subtle kindness and patience emanating from objects and structures around me. when i was at my worst, both in my childhood and now, i'd look around and realize i was indeed not alone

being driven home at dusk i'd see the trees break to reveal a line of massive transmission towers leading up the hill, standing tall and stoic, unreadable and complex in their design, like silent angels–i'd feel their presence over me even as we drove out of sight of their soft blinking lights

the store i entered when i was feeling scared and upset was sympathetic to me, reassuring me with the buzz of the florescent lights and giving me comforting distractions from whatever i was thinking about

the world is very hard to deal with sometimes but knowing there's these presences all around me, willing to extend kindness toward me, even if we see each other once and never again, makes me feel at ease

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We are all animals running around eating and shitting, getting sick and dying, swapping spit and making love. The grotesque body may seem to undermine modern culture, but the identification of women with the threat of nature is misplaced. The maternal function (having a uterus) is not an essential part of womanhood and womanhood is not an essential part of the maternal function.

The argument of “grotesque feminism” is that we can dissolve the harmful binary of gender by lifting the veil of monumentality, forcing the patriarchy to face its fear of those of us who identify with both the semiotic (via the maternal function) and the symbolic (via our involvement in culture). Wiping the lipstick off the dead body, if you will.

Destabilizing the binary of gender—and the other reductive binaries that Western culture clings to—frees people from the oppression of abjection. As Hélène Cixous wrote in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.”