[thatsbelievable]

[weltenwellen]

Alex Dimitrov, “Poem Written in a Cab”, Love and Other Poems

[swagvo1d]

doomed

[heavensghost]

Words by Mary Oliver engraved in rock

[sighcomics]

[serratedpens]

Tourist, Sonia Feldman

[firstfullmoon]

Robert Wood Lynn, “There is Only One Ocean”

[apocryphics]

[petaltexturedskies]

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

[findlight]

Sydney Smith, double page spread from Small in the City, 2019.    

[aconissa]

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle Vincent van Gogh, Garden at Arles (1888)

[inkskinned]

no, i understand the only way out is through, i know this and i am very familiar with the concept and i have forced myself through and through and through and through, like an arrow to an apple; like a bird to the air. i push myself through mesh and sieve and stormdrain.

i am saying this thing is like stone to me. i am saying i have taken a pickaxe and a plow and a chisel and a spoon to it and i have made no dent or scratch in the surface. i have pushed and pushed, sisyphus beside me, and still my skin gave before the stone could.

i am telling you if there is a passage i do not see or some kind of clever way to thwart this enemy i'll take it. i've been up down and sideways of it, i've whispered to it and cajoled it and sang to it. i have tended to it like a kitten and i've kicked it to the curb. i have exhausted all available avenues and approaches as are available to me. i'll do whatever stupid fetch quest or answer the riddles three. i am standing here and every part of my body hurts and the stone is unmoved. please. if you know how to resolve this, i'm begging you.

and still, you say. the only way out is through.

[ruhlare]

[heavensghost]

[firstfullmoon]

Leila Chatti, “I Too Was Worthy,” in Wildness Before Something Sublime

[weltenwellen]

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[amnesiaguy]

The Long and Short of It, Richard Siken