WHITNEY RICKETTS

what do you say, is this the time?

(via zachariahahaha)

lunchboxpoems:

The earliest light we know

is out there on the hill this evening, calling to us—

starlight is an ancient lilac, with a talent 
for the fragile certainty:

there is a speck
of memory, then I was quiet.

What is true 
from everlasting to everlasting:

I found a good place. Then I was quiet.

It’s sacrilege to imagine

how someone should or should not have 
loved you, umpteenth time.

 

SARAH VAP

Sometimes a story is not about anything except what it is about. Sometimes you wake up and find that you actually have lost your nose. Losing my mother’s wedding ring in the Tongue River was not ok. I did not feel better for it. It was not a passage or a release. What happened is that I lost my mother’s wedding ring and I understood that I was not going to get it back, that it would be yet another piece of my mother that I would not have for all the days of my life, and I understood that I could not bear this truth, but that I would have to.

Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do. It’s what I did then and there. I stood up and got into my truck and drove away from a part of my mother. The part of her that had been my lover, my wife, my first love, my true love, the love of my life.

CHERYL STRAYED, Sun Magazine, September 2002

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
 
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
 
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
 
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
 
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
 
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
 
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
 
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

MARIE HOWE

for once, there is nothing up my sleeve

Molly Friedman does God’s work