swim through the fires to stay in this world

Everyone should check out these poetry remixes with the bat family. Needless to say, Jason's in particular is fantastic.

This poem is so getting used for prompts the next time that there's a fanfiction comment meme running around. Provided I can figure out who it works best for.

I. I was the first person to teach you that love was not always a white light to a ship lost at sea.

II. On my worst days, the sky was a festering wound that wouldn’t heal. I didn’t want to be that to you.

III. On my worst days, you were the only word I could say without clenching my fists.

IV. I really did love you, I just couldn’t claw my way out of the ground to do it properly.

V. None of this was your fault.

VI. I’m sorry I was your lighthouse. I’m sorry you couldn’t see the wall of rocks on my shore.

(c)

Tom Hiddleson reads one cigarette.

qualapec emailed me a couple poems from Becoming The Villainess, which were totally awesome. I forwarded them to my mom, who reminded me that she’d bought me that volume for a Christmas a couple years ago, which I had totally forgotten. I went to try and find it, and no dice. I have a horrible feeling that I passed that along when I was downsizing books so they would all fit in my apartment. (They don’t, I need another bookshelf.)

I’m totally kicking myself.

Anyway, have some poems about badass ladies:


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Eclipse
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

She's been warned not to sleep with moonlight
on her face or she will be taken from her house.

She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts
her face to the night sky when no one is looking.
During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark

and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures
just outside of town, surrounding the dumb cows

in a wet mess of croak and sizzle. Years later,
she would touch the hand of a green-eyed man
by the weird light. Because of him, she plants

a moon garden: freesia, snowdrops, fothergilla,
bugbane. She is a runner-bean, stretching best

and brilliant in this light. Their child is moon-faced.
She is crazy about them. She is lunatic. She
is taken. She is a hymn book flipped open.

Obedience, or The Lying Tale
Jennifer Chang

I will do everything you tell me, Mother.
I will charm three gold hairs
from the demon's head.
I will choke the mouse that gnaws
an apple tree's roots and keep its skin
for a glove. To the wolf, I will be
pretty and kind and curtsy
his crossing of my path.

The forest, vocal
even in its somber tread, rages.
A slope ends in a pit of foxes
drunk on rotten brambles of berries
and the raccoons ransack
a rabbit's unmasked hole.
What do they find but a winter's heap
of droppings? A stolen nest, the cracked shell

of another creature's child.
I imagine this is the rabbit way
and I will not stray, Mother,
into the forest's thick,
where the trees meet the dark,
though I have known misgivings
of light as a hot hand that flickers
against my neck. The path ends

at a river I must cross. I will wait
for the ferryman
to motion me through. Into the waves
he etches with his oar
a new story: a silent girl runs away,
a silent girl is never safe.
I will take his oar in my hand. I will learn
the boat's rocking and bring myself back

and forth. To be good
is the hurricane of caution.
I will know indecision's rowing,
the water I lap into my lap
as he shakes his withered head.
Behind me is the forest. Before me
the field, a loose run of grass. I stay
in the river, Mother, I study escape.

Since April is National Poetry Month, I figured this would be a good time to throw myself on my flist’s mercy and see if you can help me find a poem.

I don’t remember the specifics of the poem so much as my professor’s analysis of it. There was section where the narrator was talking about herself and a female friend flirting with a cute boy in a bar and the narrator’s friend took the boy home, the two of them taking a cab in the rain. My professor told me that the cute boy was death (specifically, committing suicide) and the poem was written by a friend of Sylvia Plath’s after Plath’s suicide.

Any suggestions?

Antilamentation by Dorianne Laux.

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

I discovered this poem via musesfool, who related it to Natasha (valid). To me, it brought to mind Tremaine Valiarde and Regina Mills. Basically, this is a poem for emotionally damaged ladies.

Dogfish
by Mary Oliver

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story – - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

NPR recited On Punctuation on their writer's almanac section today, which totally made me snooty. Oh, of course, you love commas and exclamation marks and ellipses - who doesn't? Those are the easy, slutty punctuation marks that any fool can have, no grace, so subtly, no class.

Not like the crisp grace of a period or the impressive clarity of a well-placed colon.