Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 87%

To the police officer who refused to sit in the same room as my son because he's a "gang banger":

How dare you! How dare you pull this mantle from your sloven sleeve and think it worthy enough to cover my boy. How dare you judge when you also wallow in this mud. Society has turned its power over to you, relinquishing its rule, turned it over to the man in the mask, whose face never changes, always distorts, who does not live where I live, but commands the corners, who does not have to await the nightmares, the street chants, the bullets, the early-morning calls, but looks over at us and demeans, calls us animals, not worthy of his presence, and I have to say: How dare you! My son deserves a future and a job. He deserves contemplation. I can't turn away as you. Yet you govern us? Hear my son's talk. Hear his plea within his pronouncement, his cry between the breach of his hard words. My son speaks in two voices, one of a boy, the other of a man. One is breaking through, the other just hangs. Listen, you who can turn away, who can make such a choice; you who have sons of your own, but do not hear them! My son has a face too dark, features too foreign, a tongue too tangled, yet he reveals, he truths, he sings your demented rage, but he sings. You have nothing to rage because it is outside of you. He is inside of me. His horror is mine. I see what he sees. And if my son dreams, if he plays, if he smirks in the mist of moon-glow, there I will be, smiling through the blackened, cluttered and snarling pathway toward your wilted heart. —Luis J Rodriguez

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer

If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself— sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale

I read Martin McInnes's In Ascension recently. What I loved about it is that it felt both intimate and sweeping. Intimate in the sense of going deep into the protagonist's thoughts and feelings; sweeping in the nature of the things she thinks and does. Discovering and investigating things beyond all human knowledge, monologuing about the cyclic nature of life... The former keeps it grounded, the latter makes it exciting. Another book that made me feel a similar way is Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, although it's a very different kind of awe. Being a horror book and all. What are other books that can make me feel that way again?

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use

by Ada Limón All these great barns out here in the outskirts, black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass. They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use. You say they look like arks after the sea’s dried up, I say they look like pirate ships, and I think of that walk in the valley where J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe. And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there, low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss, and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets, woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so. So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds— disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 85%

The Merlion

tried to post this in the lemmy.world community since it's more active, but it loaded for like 10 minutes before i gave up. i'm curious if it'll work here.

Adventure / Point-and-Click / Narrative Games stillitcomes • Now • 88%

IFComp - predictions, favourites?

For the unfamiliar, IFComp is the biggest event in the IF community, with usually 50+ entrants each year. The link is to all the games—which are, of course, free. Consider becoming a judge or donating to the prize pool! For the familiar—what are your favourites this year? Which game do you think will win?

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

The Figure by Joseph Fasano

[image version](https://imgur.com/gcQd9ck) **The Figure** You sit at a window and listen to your father crossing the dark grasses of the fields toward you, a moon soaking through his shoes as he shuffles the wind aside, the night in his hands like an empty bridle. How long have we been this way, you ask him. It must be ages, the wind answers. It must be the music of the wind turning your fingers to glass, turning the furniture of childhood to the colors of horses, turning them away. Your father is still crossing the acres, a light on his tongue like a small coin from an empire that has always been ruined. Now the dark flocks are drifting through his shoulders with an odor of lavender, an odor of gold. Now he has turned as though to go, but only knelt down with the heavy oars of October on his forearms, to begin the horrible rowing. You sit in a chair in the room. The wind lies open on your lap like the score of a life you did not measure. You rise. You turn back to the room and repeat what you know: The earth is not a home. The night is not an empty bridle in the hands of a man crossing a field with a new moon in his old wool. We abandon the dead. We abandon them.

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

The Myth of Innocence by Louise Glück

[image](https://i.postimg.cc/VkcYFMt8/myth-of-innocence.png) One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her. The sun seems, in the water, very close. That's my uncle spying again, she thinks— everything in nature is in some way her relative. *I am never alone,* she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer. No one understands anymore how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She remembers sunlight flashing on his bare arms. This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away. She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this moment she couldn't live without him again. The girl who disappears from the pool will never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was. She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, *I was abducted,* but it sounds wrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, *I was not abducted.* Then she says, *I offered myself, I wanted to escape my body.* Even, sometimes, *I willed this.* But ignorance cannot will knowledge. Ignorance wills something imagined, which it believes exists. All the different nouns— she says them in rotation. *Death, husband, god, stranger.* Everything sounds so simple, so conventional. I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl. She can't remember herself as that person but she keeps thinking the pool will remember and explain to her the meaning of her prayer so she can understand whether it was answered or not.

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

Mother's Talk by Yong Shu Hoong

[Image link](https://i.postimg.cc/7LZwVDLf/Screenshot-2023-07-31-223644.png) *After attending a talk where Kuo Jiang Hong spoke about how she once asked her mother whether her late father, Kuo Pao Kun, was really a Communist.* *(Further context for non-Singaporeans: in our country's early years, the government was very militant in purging all traces of communism. Kuo Pao Kun, a playwright who wrote very political plays, was detained for over four years without trial on communist conspiracy charges, among others.)* The flipside of a conviction is an acquittal. The upside of total despair is my denial. There can be no downside. There can be no middle ground in this memory of home written on bare walls. One man's life pivots upon a cutting edge so let's pray the wind doesn't blow. When innocence falls by the wayside the flipside of anger is a calm demeanour. But silence can be a strength, just as too many words can be troublesome. Do not trade kisses for hard knocks. Do not trade your eye for my tooth. There are nightmares we do not rise from while too much time has taken flight. The curbside of a road is where the wildflowers come to life. The flipside of a flipside brings us somewhere else. And we cannot be sure if we have turned or returned. In the end there is only my conviction. Do not doubt me or your father. Just come warm your frigid hands by the fireside. The flipside of a prolonged winter is this incandescent bulb that pretends to be the sun.

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

And Still It Comes by Thomas Lux

[image](https://i.imgur.com/VHOAQFK.png) **And Still It Comes** like a downhill brakes-burned freight train full of pig iron ingots, full of lead life-size statues of Richard Nixon, like an avalanche of smoke and black fog lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal, remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back, faster when you turn to face it, like a fine rain, then colder showers, then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail, fist-size, then jagged laser, shrapnel hail thudding and tearing like footsteps of drunk gods or fathers; it comes polite, loutish, assured, suave, breathing through its mouth (which is a hole eaten by a cave), it comes like an elephant annoyed, like a black mamba terrified, it slides down the valley, grease on grease, like fire eating birds’ nests, like fire melting the fuzz off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute and gorging, never to cease, insatiable, gorging and mute.

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

There Are Birds Here by Jamaal May

[image](https://i.imgur.com/IonkaZl.png) *For Detroit* There are birds here, so many birds here is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girl’s hands tear and toss like confetti. No, I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can’t stop smiling about and no his smile isn’t much like a skeleton at all. And no his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-dance as anything else, but they won’t stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in that birdless city.

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

My Husband Discovers Poetry by Diane Lockwood

[image form](https://imgur.com/a/FZ8MNTU) Because my husband would not read my poems, I wrote one about how I did not love him. In lines of strict iambic pentameter, I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor. It felt good to do this. Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder. Towards the end, struck by inspiration, I wrote about my old boyfriend, a boy I had not loved enough to marry but who could make me laugh and laugh. I wrote about a night years after we parted when my husband's coldness drove me from the house and back to my old boyfriend. I even included the name of a seedy motel well-known for hosting quickies. I have a talent for verisimilitude. In sensuous images, I described how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes, got into bed, and kissed and kissed, then spent half the night telling jokes, many of them about my husband. I left the ending deliberately ambiguous, then hid the poem away in an old trunk in the basement. You know how this story ends, how my husband one day loses something, goes into the basement, and rummages through the old trunk, how he uncovers the hidden poem and sits down to read it. But do you hear the strange sounds that floated up the stairs that day, the sounds of an animal, its paw caught in one of those traps with teeth of steel? Do you see the wounded creature at the bottom of the stairs, his shoulders hunched over and shaking, fist in his mouth and choking back sobs? It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

to touch a ghost by Darius Atefat-Peckham

[Image version](https://imgur.com/YSzpvUE) (original is also right-aligned but i couldn't do that in lemmy) The first sound was the quieting of my fingers brushing the first, brief shocks of hair from your head. Still. There when our father said we had five seconds to cry before he’d get angry or cry himself. When the child psychiatrist watched you play with ghosts, diagnosed *seems like a perfectly happy child to me.* Am I both or neither of us now? My fingers through your hair aren’t so much fingers anymore. My touch not so much touch. Only breeze, your dark hair like mine, this absence you’ll hear now and for the rest of our lives. Half-drowned tree in the lake shrouded in mist. Listening, beyond the doorway of that haunted shore where you wake from every dream, our mother saying, I speak with the dead. If I can reach and hold across this always, these galaxies, your forehead like a steaming cup to my lips. If I can mouth my silent swan- song into you, know this without my saying it: Brother, lend your ear. There are many different ways to sing yourself to sleep. *Like in your head?* Our father pleads. *No,* she mouths. *Like I’m speaking to you now.*

Poetry stillitcomes • Now • 100%

The Gift by Li-Young Lee

[Image version](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DY1jZQiWsAcHe8d?format=jpg&name=900x900) To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand. Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.