Objects In Art: Swords/daggers

Ama Codjoe, from Bluest Nude: Poems; “Bluest Nude”

[Text ID: “I crave. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”]

I read the flecks in your eyes

like how a girl all alone

would read poetry.

.

Your eyes tell an odyssey

of the thousand lies you've heard,

each one a dark star.

.

Somewhere within your iris

there's an epic of pain and

love in equal parts.

.

Eyes like the night sky.

I see the galaxy and

wonder where I could fit in.

Just because I worked there does not mean I am not sick

I should be institutionalized, but I know all of their tricks

(I know I’m slipping further into mental illness to an alarming degree but I’m too traumatized from working in a psychiatric hospital to seek more intensive help than my weekly therapy and nightly Lexapro. I saw how my patients were treated and I quit because of it. Becoming one of them is a terrifying prospect)

Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing. A memory to someone. A home to a life.

Nayyirah Waheed

do you miss me like i miss you?

do you feel the same heartbreaking pain as i do?

or is it only me who feels this way?

Liberty and Fifth, Pittsburgh, ca. 1940

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost

The Pittsburgh Press, Pennsylvania, January 14, 1935