I Want To Leave No One Behind.

                              I want to leave                               no one behind.

To keep & be kept.

                             The way a field turns                              its secrets

into peonies.

                            The way light                             keeps its shadow

by swallowing it.

Ocean Vuong, from “Into the Breach,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) 

I’ve stopped being sorry for all my soft. I won’t apologise because I miss you, or because I said it, or because I text you first, or again. I think everyone spends too much time trying to close themselves off. I don’t want to be cool or indifferent, I want to be honest. If I love you at 5AM, I’d damn well rather that you know I felt it. If I love you two hours later, I’ll tell you then too. Listen, I won’t wait double the time it takes for you to text me back because I don’t want to. I don’t care enough to be patient with you. I’m happy, you made me feel that way, don’t you want to know? So that’s how it’s going to be. I’m going to leave myself as open as a church door. And I’m going to wake you up before the crack of dawn to tell you that I’m fucking joyful, no pretending, not from me, not ever. Would you like some coffee, would you please kiss me? Here, these are my hands, this is my mouth, it is all yours.

Azra.T “Don’t Wait Three Days to Text First.” (via goodquoteco)

i don’t know what ephemeral / means, but i know i bought sandwiches / for lunch with my mother’s tips, i know / when the economy crashed, beauty was / the first thing my mother’s clients crossed / off their weekly budget

Melissa Lozada-Oliva - “Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe She Got Up Early” (via buttonpoetry)

This nation calls my grandmother a crime, but there are not enough hands to wring the blood out of your name, America always reaching for a gun, America rechristening wombs into bomb shelters.

Kristin Chang, “Women of No Nation,” published in Teen Vogue (via bostonpoetryslam)

Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko. 2017. 

One morning, eleven-year-old Deming Guo’s undocumented mother Polly leaves for her job at a nail salon. She never comes home. Deming is adopted by two white professors who rename him “Daniel Wilkinson” and attempt to mold him into a truly “American” boy. Lyrically poignant and bitingly raw, Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers exhumes themes of family and community, intergenerational emotion, and the oft-erased brutality of the immigrant experience. 

Told from the perspective of a growing child, it is at once a bitterly tender bildungsroman and a reflection of structural sociopolitical faultlines in a jarringly torn family. Though Deming’s tale could have been overlaid with heavy themes of immigration and despairing politics, Ko centers the narrative around the child who’s lost a parent—at the end of the day, the perplexity, gravity, and irreconcilable belief of being left and lost is the focus of this elastic, penetrative story.

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(via sinethetamagazine)

People are art. Their skin a soft canvas of creases and bumps and stretch marks you’ve never felt, each telling their own story. Their freckled stained eyes, a constellation the skies could only dream of creating. And all of their movements, even the slightest ones, like a taking a breath of air suddenly become poetic.