Dear January,
You are long and bleak, you are monochromatic and suffocating.
You curl around yourself like a sleek grey cat, turned inward, oblivious and self-assured, unfazed by your chilling effect. I want to like you, to embrace you to see the good in your wintry silence, but your indifference haunts me and I am left counting the days until spring.
she writes pages and pages of words–
long convoluted sentences
pared down to a small handful of rounded letters,
strung together and
waiving in the wind
the new year can bring a feeling of starting over,
another chance to get things right
there is a piece of my heart
that always and forever
leads me right back to
you
for the lonely,
the past haunts with a vengence
kicking leaves on walks
berry pies
Gene Autry
this book: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty
young bucks eating pumpkins
gathering greens from the fields
a healing pup
balsam candles
sometimes the details of life make it hard to breathe,
make it so that my heart feels squeezed and i tell myself to keep it together–
often i feel foolish because it isn’t over heroic acts or poetic words
it isn’t intense emotions over politics or rhetoric or what’s right or what’s wrong with the world–
it’s about a robin eating berries in the snow (why didn’t he migrate?)
and a detail in the railing that made me look twice,
it’s when a man holds his wife’s hand gently and absentmindedly caresses her arm,
it’s the 1968 photo where faces beam with hope and happiness,
and how his goodbye was a little hurried, like ripping off a band-aid and shaking off the sting
…a dying star can light the sky for centuries after her fall.
from Vanessa and her Sister by Priya Parman, 2014
in the clear blue morning sky, the crows flew
and their cries carried the day
i like blurry photos
and off-kilter horizons
i like old things and broken things
and abandoned places
i like pack bites from big dogs
and razor teeth on puppies
i like to see vultures in the fields
and crows in the sky
i like the smell of cloves burning
and the hissing sound of tabacco in a pipe
“How can you like that?”
is a sentence i’ve heard many a time–
and always, i like to hear it
