"I wasn’t paying attention: I was watching the thing

you had just said to me still hanging in the air between us,

its surfaces beading up with a shiny liquid like contempt
that might have been seeping from the words themselves

or else condensing from the air, its inscrutable humidity—"

❤️

You Refuse to Own by Margaret Atwood

You refuse to own
yourself, you permit
others to do it for you:

you become slowly more public,
in a year there will be nothing left
of you but a megaphone

or you will descend through the roof
with the spurious authority of a
government official,
blue as a policeman, grey as a used angel,
having long forgotten the difference between the annunciation and a parking ticket

or you will be slipped under
the door, your skin furred with cancelled
airmail stamps, your kiss no longer literature
but fine print, a set of instructions.

If you deny these uniforms
and choose to repossess
yourself, your future

will be less dignified, more painful, death will be
sooner,
(it is no longer possible
to be both human and alive): lying piled with
the others, your face and body
covered so thickly with scars
only the eyes show through

The Sigh by Ted Kooser

You lie in your bed and sigh,

and the springs in the mattress

sing out with the same low note,

mocking your sadness. It's hard-

not the mattress, but life.

Life is hard. All along

you thought you could trust in

your own bed, your own sorrow.

You thought you were sleeping alone. 

Stray by Carl Phillips

When he speaks of deserved and undeserved as more

than terms — how they can matter, suddenly — I can tell

he believes it. Sometimes a thing can seem star-like

when it’s just a star, stripped of whatever small form of joy

likeness equals. Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed

to fail — that the body is — keeps me almost steady, if

steadiness is what a gift for a while brings — feathers, burst-

at-last pods of milkweed, October — before it all fades away.

Before the drugs and the loud music, before tears and

restraining orders and the eventual go fuck yourself get your

ass out of here don’t go, the apartments across the street

were a boys’ grammar school — before that, a convent,

the only remains of which, ornamenting the far parking lot,

is a marble pedestal with some Latin on it that translates as

Heart of Jesus, have mercy, as if that much, at least, still

remained relevant, or should. If it’s true that secrets resist

always the act of telling, how come secrets, more often than

not, seem the entire story? Caladium, Cleome — how delicate,

this holding of certain words in the mouth, the all but lost

trick of lifting for salvage the last windfalls as, across them,

the bees make their slow-muscled, stunned, moving scab ...

Ryan working on the facade of Violet Hour Chicago-May 2017