The good girl is always a ghost, / the body is always a wound.

Anne Champion, from “Bettie Page and the Wisdom of Old Age,” published in Muzzle (via loveage-moondream)

…The nights disappear like bruises
but nothing is healed…

W.S. Merwin, “The Asians Dying”

Feather River Bulletin, Quincy, California, January 31, 1924

I slice grief
down to the bone

pull the meat off
with my bare hands
until I can’t wash it
off

Will you let me
hold your head
in my hands
fingers still dripping?

Will you
kiss the funeral
of my body

each weeping chair
catching rain
on the grass?

I slice grief
down to the bone
then grind the bone
into powder

Are you hungry for
the marrow of me?

Can you touch me and
come away

still clean?

To The Bone, Caitlyn Siehl

(via alonesomes)

In the sea

evilsupplyco:

I lay in the sea’s breath, gazing up to the moon.

I opened my mouth to apologize for being unclean
and tasted the water’s kiss before I could speak.

Ah, ah, ah. I am home.

In the sea, in the glimmer of light, in the darkness of night, I am home.

This is the end, isn’t it?
And you are here with me again, listening with me: the sea
no longer torments me; the self
I wished to be is the self I am.

Louise Glück, from Meadowlands (via petrichour)

We’ve heard you were a victim.
Stop crouching in shadows, chewing your hair.
You can be graceful, not like a ballerina,
like a hedge of coral,
Built up and eaten and worn down
yet alive, carving the rhythms of the seas.
You can be a threshing sledge,
new and sharp with many teeth.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Okay, Ophelia” (from her collection “Becoming the Villainess" (via fromsappho)