I’ve been a woman

I’ve been a woman
with my legs stretched by the wind
rushing the day
thinking i heard your voice
while it was only the night
moving over
making room for the dawn.

Sonia Sanchez

write your own goddamn truth

Read a magazine before you submit your work there. It’s really important to feel connected to the mission of a magazine that is publishing your work. If you don’t know where to submit your work, think of writers whose work you admire and read the magazines they’re publishing their work in. Ultimately though, the work is more important than where it’s published — it’s a cliché, the whole high school “be yourself!” pep talk, but seriously, write your own goddamn truth. You’re the only person who can.

Yasmin Belkhyr
Interview with Anuradha Bhowmik
The Minnesota Review 10th November 2016

Hunters

A dark night — the streets belong to the cats. The cats and whatever small thing they find to kill — the cats are fast like their ancestors in the hills and hungry like their ancestors.

Louise Glück
Hunters

in lockdown

It’s so beautiful being in lockdown with you. Kissing your lips as if they were air and I were suffocating and desperate to breathe them in.

Poetry and pain

We spent last weekend, the three of us, turning pain into poetry.

excruciatingly painful

No words can describe how excruciatingly painful it is to catch your foreskin in the zipper of your trousers.