[bonemeadows]

june and all i can feel is the bright green tenderness of a new leaf

[mournfulroses]

Clarice Lispector, from a letter in translation to Tania Kauffman, featured in All Letters of Clarice Lispector

[mournfulroses]

Albert Camus, from a letter to María Casares featured in Correspondance, 1944-1959

[evenasmallcough]

who is invisible enough to see you?

- Paul Celan

[mournfulroses]

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written in 1912, featured in Letters To Felice

[evenasmallcough]

I have buried my love in a body.

I am burying myself little by little.

- Pam Rehm

[evenasmallcough]

I say my dirt and chaos are more loving than your cleanliness and I exile no one, this smelly hunting dog you sent to the vet's to be put away, baby, put to sleep with all her fleas. You murdered me out of your life. I do not forgive, I hate it, I am not resigned. I will howl at every hydrant for thirty years.

- Marge Piercy, excerpt from Letter to be disguised as a gas bill

[raylangivins]

[evenasmallcough]

That is what loving is, I say, it is not pain, it is not pleasure, it is not compulsion or fantasy. It is only a way of living wide open.

Marge Piercy, excerpt from In the wet

[evenasmallcough]

Somewhere in My Body Are Two Flowers for the Same Person Anis Mojgani

I do not always have the right thing to say

my foot sometimes moves without me

a wing of my library is filled

with only the knocking of one cuckoo clock

and the voices of yellow flowers

a path of empty vases follows us

somewhere in my body

small memories

fold newspapers by the thousands

turning them into small squares

[evenasmallcough]

That wobble, that wreck: I have tried again. I let down my hair. I lugged out my terror. The exhaustion, ad infinitum: throw everything you know into the ocean (and watch it come back to you, different).

- Jane Wong, How Not to Be Afraid of Everything

[evenasmallcough]

Rent by Jane Cooper

If you want my apartment, sleep in it but let's have a clear understanding: the books are still free agents.

If the rocking chair's arms surround you they can also let you go, they can shape the air like a body.

I don't want your rent, I want a radiance of attention like the candle's flame when we eat,

I mean a kind of awe attending the spaces between us— Not a roof but a field of stars.

[evenasmallcough]

the day is a dream we dream when we have no other way to take flight.

Chris Tse, excerpt from Subtitles Missing

[likeahauntingmelody]

before sunrise (1995)

[evenasmallcough]

We’ve all wanted to be loved / by an impossible thing / it’s why the monarch butterflies keep following us around

Noor Hindi, excerpt from The Document

[evenasmallcough]

Somewhere I am sleeping next to you & you are asking me about death & I am too young too young too young to know loss / & I promise you we’ll live forever.

Noor Hindi, excerpt from The Document

[mournfulroses]

Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter featured in The Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche