#BookWyrm

Fill Your Arms by Hannah Emerson

Please try only to go to the place that is just trying kissing us yearning to love this moment instead

of hating it yes. Please try to kiss this place that is probing our sweet soul that is trying to understand just what the hell is going on yes. Please

help kiss the process that is happening in this world now yes. Please fill your arms with the bear the heart the monkey the horse the kissing kissing kissing that they bring to us

today yes. Please try to help them get up to dance in ward to find the strength that will find great great great new wiring that is trying to become the nothing air that we breathe that is sweat we need to let out yes.

Please try to go to the sweat helping yourself go to the salt that will melt you yes. Please try to become the ocean that is becoming yes yes that is becoming lovely life yes yes. Please fill your arms trying to take in the nothing of everything yes yes.

— The Kissing of Kissing by Hannah Emerson (Page 48)

Mothers by Nikki Giovanni

the last time i was home to see my mother we kissed exchanged pleasantries and unpleasantries pulled a warm comforting silence around us and read separate books

i remember the first time i consciously saw her we were living in a three room apartment on burns avenue

mommy always sat in the dark i don't know how i knew that but she did

that night i stumbled into the kitchen maybe because i've always been a night person or perhaps because i had wet the bed she was sitting on a chair the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through tiny window panes she may have been smoking but maybe not her hair was three-quarters her height which made me a strong believer in the samson myth and very black

i'm sure i just hung there by the door i remember thinking: what a beautiful lady she was very deliberately waiting perhaps for my father to come home from his night job or maybe for a dream that had promised to come by "come here" she said "i'll teach you a poem: i see the moon the moon sees me god bless the moon and god bless me" i taught that to my son who recited it for her just to say we must learn to bear the pleasures as we have borne the pains

— Love poems by Nikki Giovanni (Page 47 - 48)

People-Shaped Universes by Nikita Gill

Someone once told me, We are the universe expressing itself as a human for a while.

It makes me think of every person I meet as their own little universe,

each with their own planets of thoughts and solar systems of dreams and galaxies of emotions in their bloodstreams.

People are so much bigger on the inside than they seem on the outside.

Imagine a whole world of universes constantly bumping into each other,

listening and learning, and sometimes, just sometimes,

building a perishable forever together.

— Where Hope Comes From by Nikita Gill (Page 91)

Hearing Impairment by Les Murray

Hearing loss? Yes, loss is what we hear who are starting to go deaf. Loss trails a lot of weird puns in its wake, viz. Dad's a real prism of the Left— you'd like me to repeat that? THE SAD SURREALISM OF THE DEAF.

It's mind over mutter at work guessing half what the munglers are saying and society's worse. Punchlines elude to you as Henry Lawson and other touchy drinkers have claimed. Asides, too, go pasture. It's particularly nasty with a wether.

First you crane at people, face them while you can still face them. But grudgually you give up dinnier parties; you begin to think about Beethoven; you Hanover next visit here on silly Narda Fearing—I SAY YOU CAN HAVE AN EXQUISITE EAR AND STILL BE HARD OF HEARING.

It seems to be mainly speech, at first, that escapes you—and that can be a rest, the poor man's escape itch from Babel. You can still hear a duck way upriver, a lorry miles off on the highway. You can still say boo to a goose and read its curt yellow-lipped reply. You can shout SING UP to a magpie,

but one day soon you must feel the silent stopwatch chill your ear in the doctor's rooms, and be wired back into a slightly thinned world with a faint plastic undertone to it and, if the rumours are true, snatches of static, music, police transmissions: it's a BARF minor Car Fourteen prospect.

But maybe hearing aids are now perfect and maybe it's not all that soon. Sweet nothings in your ear are still sweet; you've heard the human range by your age and can follow most talk from memory; the peace of the graveyard's well up on that of the grave. And the world would enjoy peace and birdsong for more moments

if you were head of government, enquiring of an aide Why, Simpkins, do you tell me a warrior is a ready flirt? I might argue—and flowers keep blooming as he swallows his larynx to shriek our common mind-overloading sentence: I'M SORRY, SIR, IT'S A RED ALERT!

— Learning Human by Les Murray (Page 96 - 97)

I Live in the Woods of My Words by Hannah Emerson

I live in the branches of the trees. I live in the great keeping freedom of the really helpful down yearning in the grown of the forest floor. The words fall from the sky like snow on this day. They become the floor of the forest. The ground from which all things grow into the towards. It is great great dream of life try to dream. I live in each letter that is where you will find me. They have been given to us as keys to the great breathing hope of life. I always wanted to live there but couldn't live there until the poetry gave me life of words.

— The Kissing of Kissing by Hannah Emerson (Page 19)

Peripheral by Hannah Emerson

Yes I prefer the peripheral because it limits the vision.

It does focus my attention. Direct looking just is too

much killing of the moment. Looking oblique littles

the moment into many helpful moments.

Moment moment moment moment keep in the moment.

— The Kissing of Kissing by Hannah Emerson (Page 6)

Runaway Child by Ada Limón

The ocean was two things once, in two places, north it was the high

icy waves of Bodega Bay, Dillon, and Limantour, and south it was the blue ease

of Oceanside and Encinitas, umbrellas in a sleepy breeze.

It took me years to realize those two blues were the same ocean.

I thought they must be separate. Must be cleaved in the center by a fault line.

On a call just now with my grandmother she mentions how all the flowers

I've sent are from my garden, so I let her believe it. Sweet lies of the mind.

She says she's surprised I like to grow things, didn't think

I was that kind of girl, she always thought I was a runaway child.

She flicks her hand away, to show me her hand becoming a bird, swerving

until it is a white gull in the wind. She repeats: a runaway child.

Mercy is not frozen in time, but flits about frantically, unsure where to land.

As children, they'd bring us to the ocean, divorce distraction and summer,

we'd drift with the tide southward until we'd almost lose sight of them,

waving dramatically for our return, shouting until we came back to the shore.

Once, when she was watching us, I tried to run away, four or five years old,

and when I got to the end of the driveway, she didn't try to stop me. Even shut the door.

And so I came back. She knew what it was to be unloved, abandoned by her mother,

riding her bike by her father's house with his other children, late afternoons,

before her grandmother would call her home for supper. Some days, I think

she would have let me leave, some days I think of her shaking on the shore.

Now, she thinks all the flowers I've sent are from my garden. Grown

from seeds and tended. She gets a kick out of it, this runaway child

so overly loved, she could dare to drift away from it all.

— Hurting Kind by Ada Limon (Page 68 - 70)

Panic Attack by Les Murray

The body had a nightmare. Awake. No need of the movie.

No need of light, to keep hips and shoulders rotating in bed on the gimbals of wet eyes.

Pounding heart, chest pains— should it be the right arm hurting?

The brain was a void or a blasted-out chamber— shreds of speech in there, shatters of lust and prayer.

No one can face their heart or turn their back on it.

Bowel stumbled to bowl, emptied, and emptied again till the gut was a train crawling in its own tunnel,

slowly dragging the nightmare down with it, below heart level. You would not have died

the fear had been too great but: to miss the ambulance moment—

Relax. In time, your hourglass will be reversed again.

— The Biplane Houses by Les Murray (Page 85 - 86)

If I Should Fail by Ada Limón

The ivy eating the fence line, each tendril multiplying by green tendril, if I should fail the seeds lifted out and devoured by bristled marauders, blame only me and the strip of sun which bade me come to lie down snakelike on my belly, low snake energy, and be tempted by the crevices between the world and not world, if I should fail know I stared long into fractures and it seemed to me a mighty system of gaps one could slither into and I was made whole in that knowledge of a sleek nothingness.

— Hurting Kind by Ada Limon (Page 72)

Shadows by Mary Oliver

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast terrible shadows, that each of the so-called senseless acts has its thread looping back through the world and into a human heart. And meanwhile the gold-trimmed thunder wanders the sky; the river may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town. Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins bring us to grief—but these are the hours with the old wooden-god faces; we lift them to our shoulders like so many black coffins, we continue walking into the future. I don't mean there are no bodies in the river, or bones broken by the wind. I mean everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar of the tornado swears there was no mention ever of any person, or reason—I mean the waters rise without any plot upon history, or even geography. Whatever power of the earth rampages, we turn to it dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 348)

We Are Surprised by Ada Limón

Now, we take the moon into the middle of our brains

so we look like roadside stray cats with bright flashlight-white eyes

in our faces, but no real ideas of when or where to run.

We linger on the field's green edge and say, Someday, son, none of this

will be yours. Miracles are all around. We're not so much homeless

as we are home-free, penny-poor, but plenty lucky for love and leaves

that keep breaking the fall. Here it is: the new way of living with the world

inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me

are us and them, and it and sky. It's hard to believe we didn't

know that before; it's hard to believe we were so hollowed out, so drained,

only so we could shine a little harder when the light finally came.

— Bright dead things by Ada Limón (Page 42 - 43)

I want to say something but shame prevents me

yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just

— If Not, Winter by Sappho (Page 279)

The Trees by Jericho Brown

In my front yard live three crape myrtles, crying trees We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing During a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat

Falling into us. I don't want to make more of it. I'd like to let these spindly things be Since my gift for transformation here proves

Useless now that I know everyone moves the same Whether moving in tears or moving To punch my face. A crape myrtle is

A crape myrtle. Three is a family. It is winter. They are bare. It's not that I love them Every day. It's that I love them anyway.

— The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Page 19)

Last Days by Mary Oliver

Things are changing; things are starting to spin, snap, fly off into the blue sleeve of the long afternoon. Oh and ooh come whistling out of the perished mouth of the grass, as things turn soft, boil black into substance and hue. As everything, forgetting its own enchantment, whispers: I too love oblivion why not it is full of second chances. Now, hiss the bright curls of the leaves. Now! booms the muscle of the wind.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 410)

bare by Danez Smith

for you i'd send my body to battle my body, let my blood sing of tearing

itself apart, hollow cords of white knights' intravenous joust.

love, i want & barely know how to do much else. don't speak to me

about raids you could loose on me the clan of rebel cells who thirst

to watch their home burn. love let me burn if it means you

& i have one night with no barrier but skin. this isn't about danger

but about faith, about being wasted on your name. if love is a room

of broken glass, leave me to dance until my feet are memory.

if love is a hole wide enough to be God's mouth, let me plunge

into that holy dark & forget the color of light. love, stay

in me until our bodies forget what divides us, until your hands

are my hands & your blood is my blood & your name

is my name & his & his

— Don't Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith (Page 37)