Esma
@maroonesma
"Crawling is better than nothing."
10 okur puanı
Kasım 2022 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
Okuma Hedefleri
“Had substance & sinew, damage you could see by looking between your hands & hearing blood. It was called reading, they told me, too late. But too late. I red. I made a killing in language & was surrounded by ghosts. I used my arsenal
of defunct verbs & broke into a library of second chances, the ER. Where they bandaged my head, even as the black letters kept seeping through, like this. Back there, I couldn’t get the boys to look at me even in my best jean jacket. / Did I tell you? I come from a people of sculptors whose masterpiece was rubble. We tried. Indecent, tongue-tied, bowl-cut & diabetic, I had a feeling. The floorboards creaked as I wept motionless by the rehab window. If words, as they claimed, had no weight in our world, why did we keep sinking, Doctor—I mean Lord—why did the water.”
Sayfa 102Kitabı okudu
“That one night, very soon, you’ll pack a bag with your favorite paperback & your mother’s .45, that the surest shelter was always the thoughts above your head. That it’s fair—it has to be— how our hands hurt us, then give us the world. How you can love the world until there’s nothing left to love but yourself. Then you can stop.
Then you can walk away—back into the fog -walled minefield, where the vein in your neck adores you to zero. You can walk away. You can be nothing & still breathing. Believe me.”
Sayfa 95Kitabı okudu
“You are something made, then made to survive—which means you are somebody’s son.”
Sayfa 95Kitabı okudu
Okur Takip Önerileri
“Because the butterfly’s yellow wing flickering in black mud was a word stranded by its language. Because no one else was coming—& I ran out of reasons.
So I gathered fistfuls of ash, dark as ink, hammered them into marrow, into a skull thick enough to keep the gentle curse of dreams. Yes, I aimed for mercy— but came only close as building a cage around the heart. Shutters over the eyes. Yes, I gave it hands despite knowing that to stretch that clay slab into five blades of light, I would go too far. Because I, too, needed a place to hold me. So I dipped my fingers back into the fire, pried open the lower face until the wound widened into a throat,
until every leaf shook silver with that god -awful scream & I was done.
& it was human.”
Sayfa 85Kitabı okudu
“That mercy is small but the earth is smaller. / Because I stopped apologizing into visibility. Because this body is my last address. Because right now, just before morning, when it’s blood-blue & the terror incumbent. Because the sound of bike spokes heading home at dawn was unbearable. Because the hills keep burning in California. Through red smoke, singing. Through the singing, a way out.
Because only music rhymes with music. / The train whistle heard through an opened window after a nightmare.
My mother, standing at the mirror, putting on blush before heading to chemo.
Sleeping in the back seat, leaving the town that broke me, whole. Early snow falling from a clear, blushed sky.
As if called.”
Sayfa 82Kitabı okudu
“That I read my books by the light of riotfire. That my best words came farthest from myself & it’s awesome. / Because a blade of brown rye, multiplied by thousands, makes a purple field.
Because this mess I made I made with love. Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured. Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.”
Sayfa 81Kitabı okudu
“He walks backward into the church, where Kelvin’s casket glows in the dusky light. Mothers and grandmas with heads bowed. But what he wants, or rather, what I want for him, doesn’t happen: underneath Kelvin’s button- up, the stitched pink eye in his chest, just above his right lung, doesn’t open, the .45-caliber shell doesn’t come out, won’t suspend itself in Sunday’s air, won’t make an obedient return to the barrel, splinter into lead, polymer, iron, elements, the ash of a star ejected from a cosmos into this one.”
Sayfa 71Kitabı okudu
“The fisherman suddenly a boy with too much to carry.”
Sayfa 66Kitabı okudu
“…she says, Peter, as if the dead could be called back into new, stunned bones. The snow has started up again, whitening the path as though nothing happened. But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked for and choose a place where your wanting ends—which part of war do we owe this knowledge? It’s warm in this house where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room, then. Let it be big enough for everyone, even the ghosts rising now from this bread we tear open to see what we’ve made of each other. I know, we’ve been growing further apart, unhappy but half full. That clearing snow and baking bread will not fix this. I know, too, as I reach across the table to brush the leftover ice from your beard, that it’s already water. It’s nothing, you say, laughing for the first time in weeks. It’s really nothing. And I believe you. I shouldn’t, but I do.”
Sayfa 64Kitabı okudu
“I used to cry in a genre no one read. / But ghosts say funny things when they’re family. This man and I, we take what will vanish anyway and move it aside, making space. There is so much room in a person there should be more of us in here. Traveler who is inches away but never here, are you warm where you are? Are you you where you are? Something must come of this. In one of the rooms in the house the man and I share, a loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call it Proof. / How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives?”
Sayfa 63Kitabı okudu
“Time is a mother.
Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.
In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu.
And the word for weakness is Yếu.
How you say what you mean changes what you say.
Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.
Rose, I whispered as they zipped my mother in her body bag, get out of there.
Your plants are dying.
Enough is enough.
Time is a motherfucker, I said to the gravestones, alive, absurd. Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through.
Stillness. That’s what it was.
The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow, more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting.
Like him, I caved.
I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The lights blazed around me into a white weather
and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, into the world, screaming
and enough.”
Sayfa 55Kitabı okudu
“let me enter this nearly-gone yes the way death enters anything fully without a trace,”
Sayfa 51Kitabı okudu
“in the snow & you’re smiling because the stars are just stars & you know we’ll only live once this time.”
Sayfa 50Kitabı okudu
“How once, after weeks
of drought, I walked through my brother’s laughter just to feel the rain. O
wind-broke wanderer, widow of hope & ha-has. O sister, dropped seed— help me— I was made to die but I’m here to stay.”
Sayfa 39Kitabı okudu
“I walked from the wreck till the yards became years, the dirt road a city, until my face became this face & the rain washed the gasoline clean from my fingers. I found a payphone in the heart of the poem & called you collect to say all this knowing it won’t make a difference, only
more. So hello, hi, the blood inside my hands, is now inside the world. Words, the prophets tell us, destroy nothing they can’t rebuild. I did it to hold my father, to free my dog. It’s an old story, Ma, anyone can tell it.”
Sayfa 37Kitabı okudu