"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I ( Read more... )

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was-
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

(Louise Glück)

The Nails
by WS Merwin

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall
Like a calendar in one color.
I wear a torn place on my sleeve.
It isn’t as simple as that.

Between no place of mine and no place of yours
You’d have thought I’d know the way by now
Just from thinking it over.
Oh I know
I’ve no excuse to be stuck here turning
Like a mirror on a string,
Except it’s ( Read more... )

Every morning ( Read more... )

It's obvious that the American dream is to be extraverted. We want our children to be "people who need people." We want them to have lots of friends, to like parties, to prefer to play outside with their buddies rather than retire with a good book, to make friends easily, to greet new experiences enthusiastically, to be good risk-takers, to be open ( Read more... )

We celebrate their days,
eat hot dogs, love baseball,
but they say we were born to weed,
change diapers, carry crates in the gray of dawn
while they sleep. Awake, they look at us without seeing.

We see ourselves clearly, know ourselves
precisely, without parades and picnics.
To survive, we must.

I'm one of the invisible living among the notable.
Day after ( Read more... )

"The essence of male chauvinism as it is mixed with sexual desire is that first the man makes you mad with desire for him, sexually and physically, emotionally, by stroking you verbally and physically, telling you you are beautiful, wonderful, interesting, etc. Then he has you--and you have him. Then he begins to mix his love with condescending ( Read more... )

“When you find a genuinely loving person… you will see that you are in his heart not because you look a certain way or act a certain way, but because he is following his own nature-loving others is just the easiest way he knows how to be. When you realize this, the whole problem of not deserving is exposed for the illusion it really is.”

-Deepak ( Read more... )

By Wendi C. Thomas
Sunday, November 11, 2007

The bad part about being black? It's the discrimination, the prejudice, the bigotry that follows you, no matter how much money you make or education you attain. With white friends, I don't usually talk about it. With black friends, I don't have to.

But as an African-American Metro columnist at this ( Read more... )

"So, let me put this in the first person: I was born in the United States in 1958, the post-Playboy generation. I was taught a very specific sexual grammar, which Catharine MacKinnon has succinctly summarized: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object.” In the world in which I learned about sex, sex was the acquisition of ( Read more... )