Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
I think it’s the expected “back at work after time off” vibes but this week does feel really hard. This one is a good reminder that things WILL be hard, but that’s OK.
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
by Joseph Fasano
Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
It’s cara cara orange season and I’ve been buying bags of them and they’re so pink! and sweet! “But then I peel an orange” and yeah, it’s all pretty amazing when you think about it.
I Feel God in This Chili’s Tonight
by Lyndsay Ruth
Have you had a strawberry lately?
Seen a little birdie drink from a puddle?
Beheld how the mist kisses the lake?
Pondered the voting system of bees?
I’m often awestruck
at the spiritual fixation on the afterlife
when this one is right here, right now–begging
for the kind of care and curiosity that
devout folks seem to save for Kingdom Come
Some days I look around and think,
What in the hee-haw hell is this?
But then I peel an orange or play the piano or
hear a person I love laugh so hard they honk
And I have no doubt that what I’m glimpsing
right here, right now
is heaven
This has a line that’s on theme for the month (“What were you wearing? Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?”) and also a construction that makes me want to be in a poetry analysis class again–it looks like a sonnet and the internal rhymes make it feel like one, but it technically isn’t. Whatever it is, it’s a delight, like all of Ada’s poems.
While Everything Else Was Falling Apart
by Ada Limón
In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still here it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.
This is a good one for spring and for remembering we weren’t meant to work until we die.
Giving Notice
by Joy Sullivan
One day soon, you’ll rise from your desk or quietly excuse yourself
from the meeting or turn the car around in the middle of the street.
Anything might trigger it. An open window. A sunny day in April.
Daffodils panting in a mason jar. Call it madness. Call it glorious
disappearance. Call it locomotion. Do what you should have done
years ago. Let your body out to pasture. Fill your calendar with nothing
but sky. Surrender to the woods. To cicadas and sap beetles. To the moths,
the color of memory and dream. Wear dusk like an ancient cloak. Hurry—
there’s still time to creature—to pluck all the wild cloudberries and carry
them home. Even now, you can hear coyotes crying at the canyon’s edge.
Grow back your hackles and howl. This was always your first chorus,
the mother tongue, a feral hymn you know by heart.
The Poets.org Instagram account shared this one four days ago and it was a good interruption to the doom scroll. We didn’t sign up for this but “you might as well/ get up and at it, pestilence be damned.”
Incantation of the First Order
by Rita Dove
Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby.
No bleeped sheep or rosebuds or twitching stars
will diminish the fear or save you from waking
into the same day you dreamed of leaving—
mockingbird on back order, morning bells
stuck on snooze—so you might as well
get up and at it, pestilence be damned.
Peril and risk having become relative,
I’ll try to couch this in positive terms:
Never! is the word of last resorts,
Always! the fanatic’s rallying cry.
To those inclined toward kindness, I say
Come out of your houses drumming. All others,
beware: I have discarded my smile but not my teeth.
This was written in 2018, which in hindsight seems like a golden dream compared to how things are going in the second administration. There’s something to be said for adverbs being cathartic, though. “Things got ugly suddenly embarrassingly forcefully,” indeed.
American Sonnet For The New Year
by Terrence Hughes
Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully
I’ve posted this one in April three times since 2018, but I think it’s time to break it out early this year. I don’t know about you, but I could use someone reminding me spring is coming and not to give up. I could use someone commiserating over “whatever winter did to us, a return/ to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us.”
Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
This one reminds me a little of one of my favorites by Naomi Shahib Nye–it has that same idea that people are fundamentally OK. Lord knows I need to hear this lately; also, “the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether” is absolutely perfect.
(Because I had to look it up: Eschatology is “the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.”)
eschatology
by Eve L. Ewing
i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver
and they say it back—
when someone holds the door open for you
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—
walking my dog, i used to see this older man
and whenever I said good morning,
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—
in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether.
when the clerk says how are you
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’
i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot.
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + intellajet’
i mean when we do go careening into the sun,
i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car,
right now! it’d just take a second—
and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat,
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.
but I won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star
I found this last Friday and it’s like the writer was in my head. Happy 234th day of January, friends.
Still January
by Alix Klingenberg
Honestly, I’m sick of the internet
and doing the dishes. I’m over
having to eat every few hours
and the gnawing sense of doubt
that everything is just repeating
itself but in a slightly worse
configuration. I don’t want to
revamp my style or get a new rug.
I don’t want to scream my fears
into the screen or point with rising
urgency at the trees. My god, the
beloved trees and the bees and the
wolves and the children. It’s all
so horrific and I am not helping.
But I’m writing and maybe that’s
something. It is still January after all.
This is a short, recent one–but boy does it feel appropriate. Keep doing beautiful things, friends. That’s how we save us.
In 150 Characters or Less
by Nikita Gill
Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things
and trying to make life worth living
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything,
but I believe in that.