Weekly Edition #14
salvage by Rachael McKibbens
I have learned to need the body
I spent years trying to rid the world of
have learned to cherish its pale rebel hymn
warped by ghost heat, carried, carried
by all my loyal dead. I have learned
to crawl backward into the wilderness
to ask, to eat, to steep in your gentleness.
Let this be where I permit forgiveness
to know your name, to leave our cruelest years
where & how we need them most—
behind & unlit.
Art by Alberto Morrocco
Other poems I enjoyed reading this week: (read the full poem in the link below each excerpt)
"love is a funny story. it wakes up and
builds a plot. it wakes up and shapes you into the
kind of woman your mother studies. i am not per-
fect in it. i am not even remotely articulate. but it
is big, this love. it is airborne and triumphant."
-Until The Stars Collapse by Tonya Ingram
"When life cracks us
like a broken tooth,
when it wears us down
like the tread of old tires,
when it creeps over us
like shower mold, isn't this
what we cry for?
Maybe all that shouting
is shouting to God, to the universe,
to anyone who can hear us.
In lockdown within our own skins,
we're banging on the bars with tin spoons,
screaming in the only language strong
enough to convey the shock
of our shameful need. Fuck! --
we look around us in terrified amazement--
Goddamn! Goddamn! Holy shit!"
-In Praise of Four-Letter Words by Ellen Bass
"Your body is away from me
but there is a window open
from my heart to yours.
From this window, like the moon
I keep sending news secretly." -Window by Rumi
"Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches." -Epistemology by Catherine Barnett
"I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city."
-There Are Birds Here by Jamaal May
Recommended Listening:
Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera) - Doris Day
Headache - Grouper + In Dreams - Xiu Xiu vs. Grouper
And Nothing Hurt - Spiritualized
"The water can't drown me, I'm done With my dying"
-The Water - Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling
Damon Albarn - Acoustic Collection
Links of the Week:
More Than A Newsletter, The Alipore Post Is A Platform For Contemporary Indian Voices Photos of 65 Iconic Artists In Their Bathtubs Enough (must watch) The 100x Method: Only Do It If You’re Willing To Do It 100 Times Bad news. Skim reading is the new normal.