i'm looking for something, it's true.

to find poetry in the likeliest of places, to find poetry in the unlikeliest of places, to collect it all into a treasure chest more valuable than pirate's booty, shinier than diamonds, and with weight more expensive than gold

How unfortunate is it that my parents had to literally force me to wear beautiful parts of my culture because I was afraid of being ostracized, but Selena Gomez can take aspects of the clothing I grew up with and make money off of them? How unfortunate is it that South Asian immigrants and South Asian Americans are Otherized every single day for the way they look, talk, and dress, but Urban Outfitters continues to commodify and make a profit off the sale of bindis – as made popular by American pop stars?

[..] My bindi is not a way for you to present yourself as being friendly to South Asian culture while exotifying it. My bindi is from my mother, put in my drawer because it is another mark of my internalized Otherness, on top of my brown skin. My bindi is tainted by Western celebrities trying to be “cultural” or “bohemian” or “tribal.” My bindi is not just a piece of plastic, my bindi is not for sale, and my bindi is not for you.

—Anisha Ahuja, “Selena Gomez, What Are You Doing?” (feminspire.com)

(Source: feminspire, via maddishly)

How about be sappy & corny & sad
& awful & pretentious & obvious & dumb.
Because all the best poems
are at least three of these things.
It isn’t that we should quit being sentimental.
It’s that we should get super good at it.
Our hearts are eighteen hungry wolves
that are okay saying things about ‘our hearts.’

—Russ Woods, “Notes to a Young Poet,” from H_NGM_N’s project of the same name (via nps2013)

[We rise.] What else can we do, we fucking rise.

—Jon McGregor, from Even the Dogs (via the-final-sentence)

when we sleep together i am afraid to touch you
your body is a foreign country to me
it is spring time there

—Stacey Teague and Ana Carrete, “We Can Practice Sleeping Side By Side But I Don’t Think We’ll Be Any Good At It,” published in Parlor (via nps2013)

Please know there are much better things in life than being lonely or liked or bitter or mean or self-conscious. We are all full of shit. Go love someone just because; I know your heart may be badly bruised, or even the victim of numerous knifings, but it will always heal, even if you don’t want it to; it keeps going. There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there, I promise. It is up to you to find them.

—Chuck Palahniuk (via)

(Source: hellanne, via writingsforwinter)

What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that they pass proof around to their friends? It’s the same kind of world in which being labeled a slut comes with such torturous social repercussions that suicide is preferable to enduring them. As a woman named Sara Erdmann so aptly tweeted to me, “I will never understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist.