WHITNEY RICKETTS

Nothing gets me quite like a Stone Cold Steve Austin country ballad.

lunchboxpoems:

What if everything 

were revealed: where I was
last night. You, etc. The rain
is coming down like salad.

My sister’s hair

reminds me of my sister
so much I can’t
stop looking. Who am I

to have arms? On the plane
one short dream:
a baby so small
it wasn’t even human,
just a bouquet 

of light with wise
cellular eyes. If losing me
is the worst thing to happen,

your life is still a good life

EMILY KENDAL FREY

I am indebted to her for one solid thing - she made us savor the idea of becoming women. We did not view girlhood as something treasured and specific and fleeting: It was a rite, something we needed to get through to get to dessert. And now, as we all prepare for a different thicket, our gaits are different, strides long, necks tall. She taught us to give in to what consumes us, as long as it isn’t another person (though that is fun. Just stop before it isn’t). She taught us to give it up in hopes of giving it back, to fill our minds before we speak them. She is a graceful, imposing presence in her life as well as ours, and I am so happy, so thankful, that she taught us to be excited about our own and not begrudge her hers.

— youdonthavethis

remember me with yellow hair
and freckles on my nose

next Kindle imprint

My mother has been dead a year and all I have to show for it is encyclopedic knowledge of the Kardashians. That and I managed to accidentally fall in love with the two boys I’ve been avoiding falling in love with for three years. I don’t see anyone anymore, because things like that happen. 

Mostly we do the same things: drink out of jars and fill the house with tulips. Some habits are borne out of relics, projecting our idea of how life would be with you here. Some are borne out of your absence. Those are the knobby, ugly ways we miss you: refusing to do the things you would have done, until the kitchen floor is visibly grimy and no one’s changed the oil in the Jeep for two years. I like that it sounds like a tractor.

It’s no braver to be resolute than it is to sob uncontrollably; they’re both grabs at a consistent way to feel. Dad does what you would expect him to do: he ugly cries on planes, forbids me from deleting your texts. “Mikey things,” you’d say, and he is Mikey-er than ever, power-washing the sidewalk into the sunset, scrubbing the grill vigorously in cross-stitch motions. Stalwart in his melancholy and his topsiders. As Kunitz once wrote, we are who we are and only life surprises.

It is life which has surprised the little one the most, the girl, who know at 22, has a both a dead mother and her own looming terminal illness. Because she’s Nannie, she cries the least. I can count the times I have heard her voice break on one hand, and I can name the places: on the phone in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, when we were both curled up on my bed during memorial week while everyone was thumping around upstairs with mushy lasagnas, at her graduation lunch when Cindy gave her a card that said you would have been proud of her.

Stef is mad at me for not calling, but how could I call? What would I say? I know less then before. My life advice would harp on two things: sleep and work, like some austere Willa Cather protagonist. I know nothing else. I till the internet like it’s an arid field, rising with the sun and resting only when the analytics numbers drop off into the night. I am good at giving people what they need. “How Did Scott Disick’s Parents Make Their Money?”

How did I live through losing my mother? I haven’t and I will not, but I do. My mother raised me and she continues to. The sun rises in the east and it sets when I sleep and when I dream of you, your apartment is full of tulips. For now, mine is too.

I keep tilling.

For every place there is a bus
That’ll take you where you must
Start counting all your money and friends before you come back again

(Source: buendieguito)

when we were young, oh oh we did enough