It's going to hurt, Sandra Simonds (2017)

You know this
So you drink tea in the morning instead
of an entire carafe of coffee

Like a vampire, your skin cells burn
on their first sip of the sun
The ringing taste of green tea or whatever
the fuck kind of tea this is

Good Bones BY MAGGIE SMITH

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

A Poem For My Mother When She Doesn’t Feel Beautiful

Don’t worry about your body.

It isn’t as small as it once was,
but honestly, the world
needs more of you.
You look in the mirror
like you’ve done something wrong,
but you are perfect.
Anyone who says otherwise
is telling a lie
to make you feel weak.
And you know better.
You have survived every single day
for as long as
you’ve been alive.
You could spit fire
if you wanted. 

Clementine von Radics 

Ill Advised Love Poem, by John Yau

Come live with me

And we will sit

Upon the rocks

By shallow rivers

Come live with me

And we will plant acorns

In each other's mouth

It would be our way

Of greeting the earth

Before it shoves us

Back into the snow

Our interior cavities

Brimming with

Disagreeable substances

Come live with me

Before winter stops

To use the only pillow

The sky ever sleeps on

Our interior cavities

Brimming with snow

Come live with me

Before spring

Swallows the air

And birds sing

This.
Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence

When Death Comes, Mary Oliver (of course it was her)

 

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Poem for a Daughter by Anne Stevenson

'I think I'm going to have it,'
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
'Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.'
A judgement the years proved true.
Certainly I've never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart's needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman's life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first, particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but a part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.