Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

What's that poem about the cockroach and the moth where the cockroach is like "I wish I've ever wanted anything the way that moth wanted to burn itself up in that lantern" because we had to read that in high school and it still fucks me up to this day

Ok I found it it's called "the lesson of the moth by archy" and it's by Don Marquis

archy and mehitabel are a treasure, newspaper columnist Don Marquis wrote a lot of these free-verse poems in character as a cockroach named archy (always lowercase because he's a cockroach and can't reach the shift key!!) who was using his typewriter & while it started out as a way of poking gentle fun at the avant-garde poetry of his time (the 1910s - startling how little "avant-garde poetry" has moved forward, isn't it) it evolved over time into some genuinely beautiful and moving poetry

ALSO many of them have illustrations by Krazy Kat author George Herriman which are frankly iconic and adorable!!

sevdaliza !!

there is only one of everything, margaret atwood

[text reads: "I look out at you and you occur in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences, entering me, fading like them, in time you will disappear

but the way you dance by yourself on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful, so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair

sticking up from your head, it's your surprised body, pleasure I like. I can even say it, though only once and it won't

last: I want this. I want this."]

Natalie Díaz, from “American Arithmetic”, Postcolonial Love Poem (2020)

Deep Forest  -  Carl Hessmert ,   1920.

German 1869-1928

Oil on canvas ,  78 x 62 cm.

compilation of texts my mom has sent me when my cat is wailing outside my room and i haven’t opened the door for her yet

jonny bolduc, “gut” 2015

Poetry

by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age…Poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t know how or when, no, they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth had no way with names my eyes were blind, and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open, planets, palpitating planations, shadow perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers, the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, I felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke free on the open sky.

alessandro teoldi

— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra

Late Fragment

by Raymond Carver

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Sally Wen Mao, from The Kenyon Review (Mar/Apr 2020)

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

when kosinski wrote “i’m sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as i know i am completely loved.”