“…I want to sit 
under a tree on the right side of the penny.
I’ll bring my sons, who will surely
also want balloons.

And maybe - if the penny ever gets an update -

 you’ll see a mother who runs
after her sons, the sons who run after their balloons,

the balloons already floating towards the top
of Lincoln’s giant marble head.”

From “Lucky Penny” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil 

“In the end, I wonder if colonization might somehow be magical. After all, Miles Davis is the direct descendant of slaves and slave owners. Hank Williams is the direct descendant of poor whites and poorer Indians. In 1876 Emily Dickinson was writing her poems in an Amherst attic while Crazy Horse was killing Custer on the banks of the Little Big Horn. I remain stunned by these contradictions, by the successive generations of social, political and artistic mutations that can be so beautiful and painful. How did we get from there to here? This country somehow gave life to Maria Tallchief and Ted Bundy, to Geronimo and Joe McCarthy, to Nathan Bedford Forrest and Toni Morrison, to the Declaration of Independence and Executive Order No. 1066, to Cesar Chavez and Richard Nixon, to theme parks and national parks, to smallpox and the vaccine for smallpox.” 

From What Sacagawea Means To Me (and Perhaps to You) by Sherman Alexie

Also, I am just so glad my wonderful best friend (see also: demon roommate from last night) suggested this book to me. 

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—SO—SO—SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all. 

Elizabeth Bishop 

(Source: buenosaireseslarazon)

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.” 

Lorrie Moore 

Aw I never noticed the letters J O H N highlighted in the title. Love this book. 

(Source: novelist-in-me)

“How senseless to dread whatever lies before us
when, night and day, the boats,
strong as horses in the wind,
come and go,

bringing in the tiny infants
and carrying away the bodies of the dead.”

Billy Collins

I love Andrea Gibson so much it’s hard to contain. I’ve been reading Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns for so long now, in teeny tiny pieces, because I just don’t want it to end. <3 

(via buttcleavage)

THE WOMAN WHO HATES FROGS 

In a teen club’s sweet, secret pact
gone wrong, the girl was left
in a closet to hold whatever
was placed in her hand, no matter

what. Survive this, and be one of us!
Frog slipped from hand, hand to shoulder,
shoulder to floor. The spike of her heeled shoe
pierced the frog’s slick back through to its belly,

spattered her bare calf. Thirty years later,
the woman who now hates frogs
sips juice from a blue glass in her screened-in
patio. She contemplates the hibiscus,

the patio thermometer that rises
with each thinning shadow in the yard,
flaps sandal against heel. Her daughters
know well her fear, guide her path,

in pet and bookstores. In the back yard,
her garden creaks alive with dewy life
before the June sun reaches its
highest point. A frog’s eye can be yellow,

red, a liquid gray. To a frog, a tiny, dark
matter is meaningful, particularly if it moves:
fibers in the eye send signals to snap
its tongue. After a long rain, the woman

sends her husband with an empty
jelly jar to the garden - a cruel harvest
so she may work the soil freely. Makes him
promise to tighten the lid, take its air quickly.  

By Aimee Nezhukumatathil  

“All respects to Heaven, I like it here.” 

“Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather, he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness, he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.”

Colum McCann, Let The Great World Spin