The connection between natural entities and machine is revealed also in metaphors like “My mind just isn’t operating today” or “my knees are rusty”, which show how human body itself can be represented as a machine.
-Fabio I.M. Poppy, 2018

What is flesh but the cunning music of God,
the culmination of light's long lament & lamination?
-Jason Myers, 2023

Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.
-Angie Sijun Lou, 2018

Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.
You still get to be the hero.
-Richard Siken, 2006

Orpheus, I can forgive you, then,
There’s not a soul alive who wouldn’t have looked back
-Tyler King, 2018

"The urge to communicate is even stronger than the sexdrive," Trapp said. "Why do you think people gossip so much? Why can't we keep secrets? Why have we invented the printing press, the telephone,the internet? It's so ideas can grow and reproduce. Our bodies, our brains, are just machines that use ideas for a while,then toss aside when they wear out."
-Louis Sachar, 2010

Sometimes suffering is just suffering. It doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't build character. It only hurts.
-Kate Jacobs, 2009

How does the poem go again?
If you are born with an angry man in your house,
there will always be an angry man in your house.
-Antigone (ditoded on tumblr) 2023

But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
-Ursula K. Le Guin

One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.
-Otto Rene Castillo, unpublished in his lifetime

We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
-Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, 2017

No doubt transsexual women will continue to be marginalized and ostracized, and in that process we will serve as mirrors in which the oppressive segments of the feminist and lesbian communities can see how they perpetuate some of the very social evils and stereotypes they fight against in the dominant culture.
-Nancy Burkholder, 1991

That is why the peace that we want is not the peace that we had before, because that wasn't peace, it was death and contempt, it was pain and suffering, it was disgrace. That is why we are telling you, with respect and love, boys and girls of Jalisco, to raise high the dignified flag of peace, to write poems that are "Prayers for a Dignified Life," and to search, above all, for equal justice for everyone. Salud boys and girls of Jalisco.
-CCRI-CG of the EZLN, 1994

If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.
-Marjane Satrapi, unknown (by me)

LET YOUR DAD DIE ENERGY DRINK: BECAUSE YOUR DAD THINKS A HAPPY ENDING IS ONE WHERE YOU LIVE FOREVER IN A CABINET WITH HIM AND A BIRD AND THAT’S A BAD IDEA FOR YOU
-Cecilia Corrigan, 2021

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
-William Carlos Williams, 1962

Here's the deal, Ouroboros.
Bite down,
or let go.
-canonkiller, 2023 (please view with the art!)

To vomit at will was my privilege.
Indoor plumbing was a must.
-Erin Marie Lynch, 2023

Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog
-Anne Carson, 1998

the seats are
empty.
the theater is dark.
why do you keep
acting?
-Charles Bukowski, 2008