Dawn, She Said.

من غلامِ خانه های روشنم.

[dateinmarsh]

"The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."

Stoner, John Williams

[dateinmarsh]

Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

[orchideennacht]

“How I love your moonstones, those jewels that fall on your breast like tears of light. Beneath the folds of your silver-gauze gown I divine the beauty of your naked body. Everything to which you have lent your enigmatic grace enchants me. I adore your mysteriously pale hair. I shall be whatever you make of me. For you are the marvellous Priestess of some faith I do not yet know.”

— Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared To Me

[dateinmarsh]

“I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.” She paused, took a little sip from her white mug of water, then continued:

“It means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures. At least for a time. No monolithically good Siegfried hero versus monolithically bad dragon. And look at what belief in that kind of total good versus total evil did. Hitler listening to Wagner in Nuremberg. That’s what I’m getting at, you see? The flatness of me being this hero artist, or you being this martyr NSA threat. None of that is real. You know this. I’m not Siegfried any more than you’re a dragon.”

Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

[dateinmarsh]

"Early spring, that’s when I first thought I might love him. That time of year when, in Indiana, each afternoon the sun came out to melt the previous night’s snow. Curious buds poked their heads through the topsoil into the suspicious heat, only to be rebuked at night by sudden frosts."

Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

[dateinmarsh]

“Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”

Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

[dateinmarsh]

"Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull."

Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

[dateinmarsh]

چه سال پربارانِ غریبی،

چه اندوه دست و دلبازی...

[dateinmarsh]

Joni Mitchell, March 1991, discussing her album 'Night Ride Home'.

[mournfulroses]

Sara Torres, from her novel titled "X Is Where I Am," orginally published in March 2026

[dateinmarsh]

The sun grants light to sky and earth,

and at dawn it is beautiful.

The clouds let rain fall softly.

The plains are green. There is no harm.

There is joy;

the others are right.

Behold, Alborz!

It is tall, its head grazing the sky.

And we stand at the foot of Alborz,

standing firm,

and before us—

enemies born of our own blood,

with an ugly smile.

And I know a people

who still say:

Arash will return.

[dateinmarsh]

...it's the refined femininity of ancient Japan, with power.

[dateinmarsh]

گریبانِ اُمید را بگیر.

[dateinmarsh]

فراوان آستانه‌ها

که بر کلیدِــ‌خانه‌ــگُم‌ــکرده برق می‌زنند...

به پذیرند... یا به ریشخند؟.. نمی‌دانم...

می‌دانی؟

مور می‌رمد

که خیره خفته‌ای؛

خاک را اما

به جویدن

بگذار،

که از تبارِ توست.

و سپیده می‌زند.

So many thresholds—

glinting to the one who's lost his house keys

Will they welcome?

Or mock?

—I do not know...

You know?

The ant recoils—

startled by your wide-eyed sleep;

but the earth,

let it go on chewing—

it bears your bloodline.

And the dawn breaks.

Seeing, Bijan Elahi

[metamorphesque]

"Schiele paints what Kafka dares to write: the soul, caught mid-exit from the collapsing architecture of the flesh. The silence of Schiele’s paintings echo the inky words of Kafka, as if Schiele’s paintbrush and Kafka’s pen were touching opposite sides of the same wound. And yet, what fascinates me most is not just how Kafka and Schiele expose the rupture between body and self, but the difference in how they respond to the shame it brings. Kafka turns inward. He tries to vanish into language, to dissolve into the walls of his prose. His characters shrink, fold into themselves, dissolve, wither — devoured not just by the world but by their own self-disgust. His response to shame is silence, erasure, disappearance. But Schiele does the opposite — he confronts shame with brutal visibility. He drags it into the light, paints it in trembling lines and raw color, and then dares us to look at it — at him. His figures do not hide their distortion — they weaponize it. They do not avert their eyes; they catch ours. They demand to be seen, even in their distortion, and especially in their nakedness."

Portrait of a Body in Revolt: Schiele and Kafka, Tathev Simonyan

[dateinmarsh]

"C’est toujours en elle qu’elle regarde, surprise par la vue de ce chaos noir, perplexe devant ce qu’elle abrite, réticente bien naturellement, mais tentant d’admettre son incroyable existence."

Un Chapeau Léopard, Anne Serre

[dateinmarsh]

"Souvent, le corps de Fanny était pensif comme tout son être. Interrogatif, même. Elle avait une manière de se tenir en maillot de bain dans un lac de montagne, de l’eau jusqu’aux genoux, comme une question. Elle ne scrutait pas les lointains, elle ne regardait pas précisément le voile moiré que forme la surface du lac, non, elle était debout et attendait quelque chose qui de toute évidence ne pouvait se produire, une impossible apparition, une impossible explication, et si, alors, on la ramenait doucement « à la réalité », elle sortait d’un songe intense, pas gai, sous la coupole duquel ne volait aucun oiseau."

Un Chapeau Léopard, Anne Serre