Follow For More Poems On Instagram >> Jinan Safko

follow for more poems on instagram >> Jinan Safko

And I can’t help but to run my fingers down your spine like you are my favorite book. But I still cannot read you, you are your own language. Your pages are tired and torn, but I want you, I want it all.

Michelle K., “Like A Book” (via thelovejournals)

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)

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)

‘Love’, this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or 'have loved’. All these tenses mean love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '爱’ (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

                              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)