You drive like a man,
they said by way of praise, and if a poem

of ours seemed worthy they said, you write like a man.
When asked what woman poet they read, with one
voice they declaimed, Emily Dickinson.

Saintly Emily safely dead. Modern
women poets were dismissed as immature,
their poems pink with the glisten of female organs.

The virus of their disdain hung in the air
but women were now infected with ambition.
Maxine W. Kumin, “Sonnets Uncorseted”
I am in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.
John Green,The Fault in Our Stars
Awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irrepairably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.
John Green, Looking for Alaska

Poetry About Bears

Trapped in a cave of soggy wool,

mistakenly swallowed bones,

some distant fishy smell, the juice

of red hard berries, soft wild blueberries, woodland strawberries,

the foraged corks of black walnuts, 

I curl in valley at the bottom of your stomach

where apple seeds swallowed whole sprout

young-necked and curious. 

I eat only what the bear can spare: chewed hunks of salmon,

if I’m lucky, a drop or two of cold white water. 

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