Learning To Take Your Life Seriously - Ask Polly

Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling.

“Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face…” — Anne Sexton, a fragment from “Words”, from the book “The Awful Rowing Toward God” (Houghton Mifflin Co; March 1, 1975) (via Alive on all Channels)

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

From the National Geographic cover on IRAN, July 1999 (Volume 196, No. 1)

“One touch wasn’t enough.”

— Dave Smith, from “Looking Up,” Looking Up: Poems 2010-2022 (Louisiana State University Press, 2022)

“…and my whole being is aching for a green, silent spot…”

— Kahlil Gibran, in a letter to Mary Haskell, from Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and her private journal

“I whet my lips to speak your name. To kiss your hands, curling into the posture of prayer, they could almost have been carved from stone. I swear: If idolatry was my only sin, then it’s because god wasn’t watching.”

— Torrin A. Greathouse, from “Ekphrasis on Nude Selfie as Portrait of San Sebastian,” Poetry (vol. 221, no. 2, November 2022)

“Even before I touch you: how you start to imitate the way the ground fog wavers across the grass. Some nights the dew seems to soak the stars. Your laugh settling in the corners. Your words weeding the flowers.”

— Richard Jackson, from “Things I Forgot to Put on My Reminder List,” The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

paper house: amanda green, devita ravani, and lin tang by jonathan andy tan

This dude said any time you put expectations on your life you reduce the compassion and appreciation you’ll have for the experiences you live and though this is something I already knew on an intuitive level, to hear someone else say it has me burrowing into its truth like a sinkhole