“Thank you for coming into me, / keep me here as long as you can stand my human clutter.”
#thesealeychallenge 12/31
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“Thank you for coming into me, / keep me here as long as you can stand my human clutter.”
#thesealeychallenge 12/31
“At night, birds peck
peepholes into the dark
the way I have always
watched women: in the distance
between a girl & herself
is an entire body
bulls-eyed, arrowhead
holy.”
#thesealeychallenge 11/31—a gorgeous, gorgeous chapbook.
“for years I consumed nothing
that did not harm me
and still I loved, witless
as a bird flying over state lines.
I would be more grateful
if being alive hadn‘t seemed so effortless”
10/31 of #thesealeychallenge. I‘m super not going to make it to 31 books in 31 days, but am still happy at what I‘ve been able to do!
“call it the Broke Heart Diet.
love left you.
then you left you.
now all you have
is this disappearing body.”
🔥 9/31 #thesealeychallenge #poetry
“It is two kinds of lost
that I‘m lost in”
#thesealeychallenge 8/31
“& i thought i‘d be older before starting to ask
what if i die what happens to everything i haven‘t yet
said”
#thesealeychallenge 7/31
This collection feels like the last few moments you spend in a dream before waking up, and the loss you feel when you realize you can‘t get back to it. So damn good.
“I want to tell you something memorable, something you could wear around your neck.”
6/31 #thesealeychallenge #oof
“How come my alienation isn‘t soft and beautiful?”
5/31 #theSealeyChallenge
“Some believe only the already-
destroyed are safe. I try to appear broken in order
to appear unbreakable, not worth further breaking.”
4/31 #theSealeyChallenge #poetry
“Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”
I finally finished this book for day 3/31 of #theSealeyChallenge. It always takes me so long to read Jericho Brown because I want to read each poem over and over and over...
“you wonder if what could have been
was ever waiting for you
somewhere.”
2/31 grateful to have finally read one of Blas‘s books. So grateful to have studied with him this past year. #theSealeyChallenge #poetry
“ingrained familial solitude”
Day 1/31 of #TheSealeyChallenge. Since graduating from my MFA in May, I haven‘t been able to read or write much at all.🤞🏽that this helps.
“I flush
at the prospect
of getting to know you
bc one of us will die
first”
#poetry #this #overwhelminglythis
“Quantum mechanics says that space is granular, made of pieces, and not only that but there is no infinity—nothing infinitely small, nothing infinitely vast.... And if space is finite, thought is finite, time is finite, then who are we in one place and who are we in another. Who are we before we leave and who are we after.”
Even better the second time. #poetry
“how long / does it take / a story / to become / a legend? / how long before / a legend / becomes / a god or / forgotten? / ask the rain / what it was / like to be the river / then ask the river / who it drowned.”
“Or it is death, the everlasting kind, not like a field, not at all like a field, which lives even as it dies, and dies as it lives. Also unlike the field, there was a time before this was here. It moved in, but we don‘t remember when, like a stepmother who came so long ago she‘s erased all memory of our mother.”
“Scientists say the average human
life gets three months longer every year.
By this math, death will be optional. Like a tie
or dessert or suffering....”
One of the best books of #poetry I‘ve read in a while. I also now own two of these somehow but I wouldn‘t say I‘m complaining 🤷🏽♂️
“You should never have
agreed to be a god
for me if you were afraid
to assume
the duties of a god...”
“does she exist if she walks past men
and they do not look
at her is she still alive is a signified
without a signifier
really impossible can that which is
signified ever become
a signifier”
This collection was even better on the second read. My mind is constantly blown by Victoria Chang‘s ability to shape and re-shape language so many times in one breath. #poetry #😩 #🙌🏽
“The thing about a watch in a box is that,
like you, it tells the same story over and over again
to no one.”
“God punched a hole in the drywall on Earth and pulled out of that darkness another god. She—
just kept her thoughts to herself. She just—
followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on, she turned it off.”
“I tell him my gods had to stay behind
To watch my people / He likes it when I talk like that”
“The bees curl, offer
their deaths to evening.
Slowness a blessing
on the body‘s horizon.”
“I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.”
“When the reasoning mind is forced to confront the impossible again and again, it has no choice but to adapt.”
This book almost immediately became one of my favorites. So lush and full, fantastical and human, I‘ve been craving this story ever since I put it down! So sad I won‘t have time to read the rest of the trilogy for a while! The last year of my MFA just started and has already engulfed me. #rip
This book helped me get out of a major reading/writing slump this summer—I picked it up on a whim because of its cover and found that I just needed to go back to my reading roots: beautiful prose, solid story, complex relationships... and magic 🤓 I think I‘m ready for my last year of grad school now. #phew
“Can you run your nimble finger down a myth‘s spinethread at 3 am?
How do you know?”
Love the deceptively simple questions this book asks itself and its reader... #nationalpoetrymonth
A super easy-to-read primer for #afrofuturism, which, as a concept, has really shifted how I think about time, space, and self. 🚀
This book made me re-think how you can take control of language and make it all your own. So cool:
“The sand-bar has shown up (and shone) and I‘m home-headed; that‘s my crab-net, and my lunch-bag, and my yellow fly-blown bucket, dragging there behind me like a ruined foot.”
Also yes, I‘m an adult who (eats mini-pizza and) reads #poetry...
It‘s always fun to buy used books and see what other people took notes on #nationalpoetrymonth 😂
“The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified
When the Dark Villain was a blackish child
Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty,
And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder
Of its infant softness.”
Gwendolyn 🙏🏽 #poetry #nationalpoetrymonth
“what is it anyway about hearing someone you love
speak your name
that‘s like being rocked back and forth,
is here anything more sacred
than that person‘s mouth”
I love how the large and the tiny live together in this #poem. By Leonardo Sinisgalli 💔
“like the ocean, having been the ocean
long before we arrived, each wave
newborn and buried at once; like us,
standing breathless at the edge,
astonished by our own lungs.” #poetry
The simplicity of that top stanza, and then those last lines..!
From “This is Bad” by Gottfried Benn #poetry in #translation 🙌🏽
Finally read Watchmen! Jon‘s relationship with time is one of my favorite things about the story.
