diogenes tries to forget by Mary Karr
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fruitrollup on tumblr // Mary Karr, excerpt from Cherry // Wendy Cope, “The Orange”
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franz wright, “to myself” / marie howe, “the gate” / mary karr, “the voice of god”
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Hello! I’m not sure if you’d know, but I’m looking for a poem.
It was a about a girl who had attempted suicide and afterwards her father had driven very far to get her plums at her request. When she had received them she promised not to hurt herself anymore as the strength from all the people who loved her would keep her going.
It was quite popular but if you don’t remember maybe someone else would? Thank you.
I know the one! It's not a poem but an excerpt from Mary Karr's Cherry 💗
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Field of Skulls
by Mary Karr
Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,
and if you're predisposed to dark — let’s say
the window you’ve picked is a black
postage stamp you spend hours at,
sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love
Lucy reruns have gone off — stare
like your eyes have force, and behind
any night’s taut scrim will come the forms
you expect pressing from the other side.
For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws
and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.
They’re plain once you think to look.
You know such fields exist, for criminals
roam your very block, and even history lists
monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe
who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters
unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps
that disgruntled mail clerk from your job
has already scratched your name on a bullet — that’s him
rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought,
for it proves there’s no better spot for you
than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing
the bad news piped steady from your head. The night
is black. You stare and furious stare,
confident there are no gods out there. In this way,
you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine
and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all
your remembered loves. If the skulls are there —
let’s say they do press toward you
against night’s scrim — could they not stare
with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh
that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,
at the force your hands hold?
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there's this passage from d.t. max's biography of david foster wallace, every love story is a ghost story, that i think about a lot when i'm reading wildbow (and other "middlebrow" writers). it's a passage about mary karr, a fellow writer whom wallace would go on to stalk and abuse.
there is something so pleasing but fundamentally empty about writing that aims at "coolness"--the fast food of prose
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— Paris, Patrick Wolf
— Oxford Blood, Autoheart
— VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God, Mary Karr
— From a Balance Beam, Bright Eyes
— Sylvia Plath
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Mary Karr, in “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer”
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