poemsbywomen

[poemsbywomen]

leaving behind all there is to love you and I thought this could be enough seated on the back sit of my car I realize you are not there oh my love, you were never there three bottles of wine, I have lost the count drunken silly hearts waiting for too much our lips can barely move, we are in each others rooms oh my love, I was never there don't look back, don't look at me now we already said our goodbyes tonight I'm taking back what is mine oh my love, we were never there.

Never there (via ourpoetryneverdies)

[poemsbywomen]

A TWILIGHT WORLD OF CONSENT RATHER THAN BELIEF

mr. method moves sheepishly through the dump muttering, method must, method must be an encyclopediaist a cyclist

moving over mounds of rubbish this once was a bottom bracket axle, a crank, a shifter, a pedal a mending machine a duty to believe an impossible collection of objects and ideas migrated here simply to become a sequential history

method muttering, what strange abundances and even stranger shortages

–Sasha Steensen

#poetry #sasha steensen

[poemsbywomen]

Father

My brother and I never called him anything but Father. My daddied friends thought it weird, laughed uncomfortably.

I never called him Dad— we didn’t. He was always Father.

Even today my brother and I refer to him as Father.

On the way to his burial thirty-three years ago, I heard my brother say he always knew Father loved him.

I had no word to add, did not know, did not assume.

–Carol Gabrielson Fine

#poetry #carol gabrielson fine

[poemsbywomen]

polyglot incantation

siya ay nakatayo sa balikat ng bundok she stands upon the mountain’s shoulders langit ay kulay ng ginto at dugo sky’s the color of gold and blood sumisigaw siya ¡mira! ¡el sol! see how the sun weeps tingnan mo! umiiyak ang araw! how this mountainslope burns nag-aapoy siya rin sky’s the color of black pearls iyan lagi ang sa aking panaginip this have i prophesized ang mukha ng araw ay umiiyak

and what are these glyphs wikang matemátiká some human machinery símbólo, enkantada, o gayuma maker of souls and tongues anong pisi o balat ng ahas what twine or serpent skin binds silangan at kanluran pearl of the orient esta punto del embarco fractured archipelago ang mga anak mo ay nakakalat your children have scattered cielo el color de perlas negras do not forget that they have names may sariling pangalan ang aming diwata

–Barbara Jane Reyes

#barbara jane reyes #poetry

[poemsbywomen]

Wide Sigh

I thought that there were two The good voice And my voice

I thought the good voice was buried And I would have to go Under my voice Which is glittery and cold To get there

Then I heard them A drumbeat and hawks Also snakes Many wild voices

Heartbeats Big beats One beat All over

Do you hear it? I hear it now Speeding up Taking me up

– melissa broder

#melissa broder

[poemsbywomen]

After He Left

When the children were small and sleeping, the night warm and raining,

I would go out to a place under the broken eaves. Naked, yes. And standing under,

wash my hair with rain and the dark of night. I could hear cars on the other side

of the duplex. I could smell the sheets upstairs. I still couldn’t touch anything

labeled future. Lonely in the rain, the spirit is beautiful. It can marry

the heart for no one to see. Like I said, I washed my hair under the broken rain,

and stood there in the night, glistening.

– jeanie tomasko

#jeanie tomasko

[poemsbywomen]

The Proportion of Broken

When time is broke and no proportion kept!        —Shakespeare

Relentless, I love relentless: relentless doors and windows unhinged with their ways to open. Thinking that cannot stop or that bee-hurry, honey-havoc hive. Some simple cogs and wheels; something is always on. Live sea that cannot stop breathing, dog chasing its scrap tail, red bird at the wind, always one flying from the sky’s china arms. Chatter, ants, television. I know no place like it. Relentless Earth and no other way out. Incoherent as seed and as close to the ground. Someone will come to dig there with relentless tenderness. Flowers, in their relentless kept beauty, will wait.  There, disembodied as doubt, the fog will double in, even try to convince itself indebted blind, of its own way. To outdo any word of mouth or maintenance of mind the dream keeps relentless time. Dreams keep relentless white air for you to breathe and without any hope of departure, they keep the love that will strike its blue match over and against your heart without bearing broken from one world to the next. I sleep out of this inconsolable chaos, without a roof where there is no proportion kept, until troubling the abrupt reeled-in hour, I alone might appear as a matter of fiction for this relentless will to forever have and have me again, till it has me, to hold.

– elena karina byrne

#elena karina byrne

[poemsbywomen]

Beautiful video, very touching to watch. Deaf black womxn (including LGBTQ deaf black women) perform a poem “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou in American Sign Language. English subtitles are in the video. The video was produced by Deaf Black Village.

#maya angelou

[poemsbywomen]

i am running towards the wrong subway platform just so i can be even more wrong from the one i will board. there are too many people wanting to be right. they are giving me wind resistance.

Elaine Hsiang, “doctor says no derailment,” from one day i will be louder than all the bruises on your knees (via bostonpoetryslam)

#elaine hsiang

[poemsbywomen]

Eros in His Striped Shirt by Beckian Fritz Goldberg

I decided to stop meeting my demons, detoured that street, that orchard full of yellow spheres that never revolved, and went around the stairs where—

This is delicate. There are things you should not say because you love someone.

I woke many nights. The last suddenly like a beat in a drum: Demon If. If with his black beard and his brown coat, gazing down at me from the stairs. How I followed him,

schoolgirl. Do you imagine at night someone going to bed the very moment you are going to bed? Turning out the light? And isn’t it so quiet you swear the heart is telepathic. Isn’t it—

I came out of myself like fire and went back in. We do lose what we never had. Because we imagine. (A dangerous imagination, Mother said)

As if in a library— as if on my naked shoulder— they whisper Yes, we are horses and offer the beggar’s ride. But I’ve done to me and I’ve done to me. (Out of control, Husband said)

Now I’m on foot, dragging the mind’s clandestiny. (You will meet the ministers but not the Prince, I Ching said) Night’s floored to the metal, ruinous obsession. Flesh, beware—

to live is homesick.

#beckian fritz goldberg

[poemsbywomen]

To the River

(for CSE Cooney) He said come to the river, the wet, wild water that is black as a mirror with nothing to show. He said come to the river, the dirt-dank river, by the dew-spangled banks of the murmur and flow. He said come to the river. And I came to the river. I came to the river, with a ribbon in my hair, with a tune on my tongue, with a name that he gave, with my red shoes tied, with my milk and my bread, with a stone in my pocket, with my heart, not my head, with my knee-socks high, and my bed unmade. He said take your red shoes off, leave your buttons undone. And he kissed me by the river until there was blood. And the river took my ribbon, which fled the current like a snake. And the river took my tongue, and the river took my name. He took from me the tune I knew; And the river made my bed. He said come to the river, the wet, wild water that is cold as a hand with no blood to warm. So I came to the river, and I stay by the river, by the silt-silked shore, by the stone that I slipped on, by the fern-beds so dark, by the buried red shoe, by the salt stain I made, near the road that I left that leads to my bed. And I know I am dead but I still cannot rest. And I’m hideous and hair-thatched because I must be trash for him to throw me to the river like a used cigarette. Fish have skimmed flesh from my jaw; they’ve nibbled with sharp teeth. My finger-bones lie tangled, far away from here, my ankle bones are further still, my smashed hips are the dirt … He said come to the river so I stay by the river, by the sopping wet earth, yes, come to the river, boys, with no ferns in your hair, come to the river, please, and warm my bed. 

– jessica paige wick

#jessica paige wick

[poemsbywomen]

Kamala Das, "The Old Playhouse"

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her In the long summer of your love so that she would forget Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge Of yet another man that I came to you but to learn What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every Lesson you gave was about yourself. You were pleased With my body’s response, its weather, its usual shallow Convulsions. You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices. You called me wife, I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and Became a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your Questions I mumbled incoherent replies. The summer Begins to pall. I remember the rudder breezes Of the fall and the smoke from the burning leaves. Your room is Always lit by artificial lights, your windows always Shut. Even the air-conditioner helps so little, All pervasive is the male scent of your breath. The cut flowers In the vases have begun to smell of human sweat. There is No more singing, no more dance, my mind is an old Playhouse with all its lights put out. The strong man’s technique is Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses, For, love is Narcissus at the water’s edge, haunted By its own lonely face, and yet it must seek at last An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors To shatter and the kind night to erase the water.

#kamala das

[poemsbywomen]

The Ceremony

All of my life I have entered into the ceremony from this door, toward the east into red and yellow leaves

It has always felt lonely though there were always messengers, like the praying mantis on my door

when I opened it this morning. Or the smell of pancakes when there were no pancakes, coffee when there was no coffee.

I walked through the house we had built together from scraps of earth and tenderness, through the aftermath of loving too hard.

You were showering to get ready for war; I was sticky from late storms of grief and went to look for poetry.

Each particle of event stutters with electricity, binds itself to coherence. Like the trees turning their heads

to watch the human participants in these tough winds turning to go, as they continue to send roots for water making a language for beauty

out of any means possible though they are dying. Everyone is dying. I am I am, deliberately and slowly of this failure to correctly

to observe the ceremony of letting go ghosts of destruction. I walk carefully through the garden, through the hallway of sobbing and laughter,

the kitchen of bread and meat, the bedroom of desires and can see no ghosts though they will take the shape of objects of ordinary living.

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes, said the next messenger. I am a human being, I said.

–Joy Harjo

#joy harjo #poetry

[poemsbywomen]

Against Coupling

I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one’s mouth, one’s breath smothered, nipples crushed against the rib-cage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: 

unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help- such eyes as a young girl draws life from, listening to the vegetal rustle within her, as his gaze stirs polypal fronds in the obscure sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur. 

There is much to be said for abandoning this no longer novel excercise- for now ‘participating in a total experience’-when one feels like the lady in Leeds who had seen The Sound Of Music eighty-six times; 

or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the seventh year running, with yet another cast from 5B. Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but the hole in the wall can still be troublesome. 

I advise you, then, to embrace it without encumberance. No need to set the scene, dress up (or undress), make speeches. Five minutes of solitude are enough-in the bath, or to fill that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.

– fleur adcock

#fleur adcock

[poemsbywomen]

Barbara Perez, "Not for You, Not for the World"

Because a little reprieve, a little hope (even for those whom I love) would exculpate the world of  its actions, I hold to logic steadfast. Belief, without knowledge, dislodges perception of all the empirical world — (even for you, mom and dad). Know that if, for you, on some filthy lie I could wish for the mind’s persistence after death, I would say no.

#barbara perez

[poemsbywomen]

The saints cannot distinguish between being with other people and being alone: another good reason for becoming one. They live in trees and eat air. Staring past or through us, they see things which we would call not there. We on the contrary see them. They smell of old fur coats stored for a long time in the attic. When they move they ripple. Two of them passed here yesterday, filled and vacated and filled by the wind, like drained pillows blowing across a derelict lot, their twisted and scorched feet not touching the ground, their feathers catching in thistles. What they touched emptied of colour. Whether they are dead or not is a moot point. Shreds of them litter history, a hand here, a bone there: is it suffering or goodness that makes them holy, or can anyone tell the difference? Though they pray, they do not pray for us. Prayers peel off them like burned skin healing. Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls. Now they seem to have no use, like the colours on blind fish. Nevertheless they are sacred. They drift through the atmosphere, their blue eyes sucked dry by the ordeal of seeing,exuding gaps in the landscape as water exudes mist. They blink and reality shivers.

Margaret Atwood, The Saints (via ilvalentinos)

#margaret atwood

[poemsbywomen]

I am not ready to die yet. I want to live longer knowing that wind still moves a dead bird’s feathers. Wind doesn’t move over & say That thing can’t fly. Don’t go there. It’s dead. No, it just blows & blows lifting what it can. I am not ready to die yet. No. I want to live longer. I want to love you longer, say it again, I want to love you longer & sing that song again. & get pummeled by the sea & come up breathing & hot sun & those walks & those kids & hard laugh, clap your hands. I am not ready to die yet.

Aracelis Girmay, from I Am Not Ready To Die Yet  (via spokenwordacademy)

#aracelis girmay