Loving dark men is a seesaw; they never tell you everything. You always wonder if the tiny red spot on a shirt is really from a spaghetti dinner like they claim. But then they put a bird back in a nest. They pull a drowning kid out of the water. And that’s all it takes: the spaghetti is not blood.
Julia Heaberlin, We Are All the Same in the Dark: A Novel
I’m nobody’s fragment.
Sandra Milo, in an interview on the Criterion Collection DVD release of 8 1/2 (1963); directed by Federico Fellini
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Lucille Clifton was born exactly 64 days after my paternal grandmother, on June 27th, 1936. She was discovered by Langston Hughes, who was shown her poetry by Ishmael Reed, himself an acclaimed Black poet and novelist. Clifton was extremely prolific during her writing career, having more than thirty works published, including poetry collections, children’s books, and memoirs. In addition to many other accolades and awards, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2007. The Book of Light, the collection from which today’s poem was taken, is available to purchase wherever books are sold.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
“How often
have our lives known that brief
immunity – the crisis which emits
a stretch of ardent unreflective life?”
We’re playing Super Mario. This level’s
designed for one player and not two.
The quick-collapsing platforms mean one always falls.
But when he hits the spikes he starts to flash.
The plumber turns invincible as a firewalker.
A chance to extricate oneself. How often
have our lives known that brief
immunity – the crisis which emits
a stretch of ardent unreflective life?
It’s afterwards that hurts. Time salts all wounds.
You come to realise: that really happened.
But first there’s a quick flick of the stick
as you leap my glimmering sprite between the spikes
and urge me onwards through a wall of fire.
© 2018 Vidyan Ravinthiran. Mercy Invincibility was first published in the Summer 2018 issue of The Poetry Review. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the author of Grun-tu-molani, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize; Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, which won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; and The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here, which won a Northern Writers Award as well as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection and the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
There’s a lot of pain, yes, but there’s also so much joy. The Color Purple is so radiant it practically glows in the dark.
The Color Purple is one of my favorite books of all time. Because there are so many books I want to read, there are only a few books I’ll reread; The Color Purple is one of them. I get more from it each time I read it. More than just a great novel, it is a blueprint for expressing love through careful attention, through putting oneself in a place of openness and willingness to accept the love we feel we don’t deserve. There’s a lot of pain, yes, but there’s also so much joy. The Color Purple is so radiant it practically glows in the dark.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
A screen is filling with black and white images:
police officers, drag queens, and a few actual
stone walls. There are links to history pages,
organizations that have taken the name,
and the website for the bar where it all began.
A bar that now makes its money off of tourists
paying homage to the riots, raising a gin
and tonic to a movement that’s still not over,
but has changed direction. Today, people talk
of marriage. Of becoming like everyone else.
It’s cold outside and inside our Harlem
apartment. A place that knows something
about fighting, about surviving, about deciding
how to be equal. Here on this day our computer
screen is filled with a president taking a second
term. A president we’ve fought to keep.
A president willing to acknowledge our fight.
We’ve learned to adapt, you and I. To find
our own meaning. Our own way into love,
sex, happiness. In the coming years, we’ll make
choices, and yes, one day, we’ll probably be
legally tied to each other. Protected under
the law. Written down in the history books.
Two men. Two names. Two bodies.
But that act, no matter how simple or elegant,
will never capture our lives, or our history,
or our desire to be undefined.
© 2013 Stephen S. Mills. Someone Somewhere is Googling “Stonewall,” Inauguration Day 2013 first appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Referential Magazine. Stephen S. Mills is the author of He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, which won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry; A History of the Unmarried, which in 2015 was named to the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List; and Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution, which in 2019 was named to the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List. You can read more about Stephen and his work at his website.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
I hope you do more than just survive. I hope you act boldly without apologizing for who you are or the things you love. I hope you make art and listen to songs that make you sing out loud. I hope you discover new places and hidden coffee shops. I hope you fall in love with stories and dance in snowflakes and raindrops. I hope you achieve all your dreams and find the courage to love yourself. I hope you live.
Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts III
Mother, you have never seen such snow, such emphasis on
setting. So it is accurate to say my heart broke in the snow.
One patient here is a Vietnam vet. His torso is hard like an
old-fashioned suitcase. Kick my dog, he says, referring to his
beloved animal over ten years dead, and I’ll kick your ass. The
light is fluorescent. Everything hums. It is so important to go
on naming, even if all I said to you this winter was snow, snow,
snow.
Then Winter: Poems by Chloe Honum is available to order from Bull City Press.
I had trouble getting today’s poem to format the way the author originally intended, so for clarity’s sake and to preserve the integrity of the line breaks, I am including an image of the poem taken by @ChelsDingman on Twitter, to whom I am indebted. Thank you, Chelsea!
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.
Sally Rooney, Normal People: A Novel
Weather is nothing until it reaches skin,
freezes dust, spits its little swords.
Kept to oceans, feeding only on salted water,
I was a rudderless woman in full tantrum,
throwing my body against worlds I wanted.
I never saw harm in lending that aches.
All I ever wanted to be
was a wet, gorgeous mistake,
a reason to crave shelter.
© 2008 Patricia Smith. From Blood Dazzler: Poems by Patricia Smith, published by Coffee House Press. Blood Dazzler: Poems is available to purchase wherever books are sold.
Her words are alchemical, an accelerant to the fire already burning inside my chest.
I love the way Patricia Smith uses the imagery of a hurricane as a metaphor for the ways in which she herself has embodied fury, longing, and destruction. I’ve never read any of her work that wasn’t breathtaking and even that seems too cheap a word to describe the effect her poetry has on me. Her words are alchemical, an accelerant to the fire already burning inside my chest. If you’ve not yet read any of her collections, today is the perfect day to start.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
The Voracious Bibliophile 