Tag: poetry

Ask me about the summer
I fell in love with someone
more blackberry bramble than girl.
Aching to be touched
but never talking about the thorns.
And me, all heavy handed
and too proud to acknowledge
the things I’d cut myself on.
I dreamt about juice
running down my chin
for months.

Trista Mateer

You liberate in me my feminine being, my most obscure and most hidden being. You make me soft (humanize, feminize,
animalize) like fur.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Nine Letters with a Tenth Held Back and an Eleventh Received,”

So maybe this time, love doesn’t kick down the door—
doesn’t rattle the windows or plant weeds in the flower garden.
Maybe you can’t smell the smoke because,
for once,
nothing is burning.
Maybe this love is all the things
those loves wanted to be when they grew up.
Maybe you spent all that time running
so that you’d know how to hang up your coat
when you were ready.

Ashe Vernon

When I am looking at my moonfaced girl,
my beautiful black-eyed thing,
and I smell her like smoke all around me
and the handsome rasp of her voice strokes my ears
and my rough-skinned hands are permitted
to settle in the soft curves of her hips
and trace the lines of her fine-wrought thighs
and she nudges her smooth nose
neckwards to smell my cologne;

this is when I know
I am the luckiest dyke in the world.

“Femme,” I.M.E.

The signs as Anne Sexton quotes

Aries: “I was the fury of your bones.”
Taurus: “I feel very close to you although our meetings and communications have not been many. There is a vulnerability we share – the warmth, the hunger.”
Gemini: “Perhaps, all I mean to say is that I adore you. Because, in a way, I think I can be senseless with you and still make sense.”
Cancer: “I want to thank you very much for sticking by me. I couldn’t say these words to you in any way aloud because you would have been embarrassed, and I would have cried.”
Leo: “All is rush or pain or shit and glory. I think my life is exaggerating itself.”
Virgo: “I felt that you were the one person I need not explain to.”
Libra: “I have special knowledge about daisies. They last and last as you and I will. They are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.”
Scorpio: “I’m going to read a poem that tells you what kind of poet I am, what kind of woman I am, so if you don’t like it you can leave.”
Sagittarius: “Once flying, I tend to fly too high.”
Capricorn: “One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.”
Aquarius: “As I may have said, I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.”
Pisces: “I cling to my own ache, I cling to the past and it gets to a point when I can’t even remember without hurting.”

poets born under each sign, part II: MOONS

Aries: Virginia Woolf

I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people.

Taurus: Hans Christian Andersen

She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart.

Gemini: T.S. Eliot

Ah, but we die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

Cancer: Henry David Thoreau

And if she faintly glimmers here,
And paled is her light,
Yet always in her proper sphere
She’s mistress of the night.

Leo: James Joyce

As I am. As I am. All or not at all.

Virgo: William Wordsworth

“What occupation do you there pursue?
This is a lonesome place for one like you.”
Ere he replied, a flash of mild surprise
Broke from the sable orbs of his yet-vivid eyes.

Libra: Anne Sexton

I was
the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes.

Scorpio: Shel Silverstein

This town grows old around me.
I cannot say I did not hear
That sound so haunting hollow—
I heard, I heard, I heard it clear…
I was afraid to follow.

Sagittarius: Lewis Carroll

I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.

Capricorn: Anaïs Nin

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

Aquarius: Margaret Atwood

You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn.

Pisces: Percy Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another’s being mingle—
Why not I with thine?