Main(e)scape

claytonator:

“What we most want is only to be held… and told… that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa’s eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama’s long hair, is being afraid and twisted faces on the bedroom wall)… everything is going to be all right.”

-Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Room

Did you know that Pluto is still considered a planet in Illinois?

After all you are quite
ordinary: 2 arms 2 legs
a head, a reasonable
body, toes & fingers, a few
eccentricities, a few honesties
but not too many, too many
postponements & regrets but

you’ll adjust to it, meeting
deadlines and other
people, pretending to love
the wrong woman some of the
time, listening to your brain
shrink, your diaries
expanding as you grow older,

growing older, of course you’ll
die but not yet, you’ll outlive
even my distortions of you

and there isn’t anything
I want to do about the fact
that you are unhappy & sick

you aren’t sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it.

-Margaret Atwood

ala(s)

even if i now saw you

only once,

i would long for you through worlds

worlds.

-izumi shikibu

Trace

I traced your face tonight.
With eyes closed
I memorized
you.
My fingertips remember
the lines the darkness
hid from me.

Tyler Knott

Love Letter

I don’t know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction. Or why,
having given up what seems so much,
I’m willing to lose even more — erasing
all this body’s known, relearning it with you.

Melissa Stein

To Dorothy

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
And a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
Of a windy night, it brushes the wall
And sweeps away the day till we sleep.

A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
The air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,

I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.

Marvin Bell

You see, I take the parts that I remember and I stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.

-Richard Siken “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”

“The brain appears to posses a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.”

I felt this way once. I will feel this way again.