[longingtobeborn]

“But I do feel strange—almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.”

— John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

[weltenwellen]

Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap

[geryone]

Night Poem, Leila Chatti

[konoko]

[konoko]

[toomanyrats]

on shame and yearning (pt.2)

[neophaim]

Sources:

S.T., "300122," Tumblr, January 30, 2022, https://www.tumblr.com/ryebreadgf/674840497145233408/300122-st.

Silas Denver Melvin, "love as an act of merciful conquer," Tumblr, November 2, 2021, https://www.tumblr.com/sweatermuppet/669052643259432960/from-love-as-an-act-of-merciful-conquer-by-silas.

chandajaan, Tumblr, accessed via https://rockboci.tumblr.com/post/674728141263093760.

Richard Siken, "Birds Hover the Trampled Field," in War of the Foxes (April 28, 2015).

Emily Palermo, "What I Could Never Confess Without Some Bravado," The Rising Phoenix Review, March 15, 2016, https://therisingphoenixreview.com/2016/03/15/what-i-could-never-confess-without-some-bravado-by-emily-palermo/.

Georges Bataille, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man (January 1, 1966).

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (April 1, 2000).

Frank O'Hara, "Homosexuality," Poetry Foundation, May 1970, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=31570.

Heather Havrilesky, "I'm Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I've Wasted My Whole Life," The Cut, November 28, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/im-broke-and-friendless-and-ive-wasted-my-whole-life.html.

Lucille Clifton, "climbing," in The Book of Light (July 1, 1992).

[cloudswamp]

speeches for dr. frankenstein, margaret atwood

[ashstfu]

having so much love in your heart is beautiful and amazing right up until you’re alone in your bedroom clutching at your chest and whimpering like a wounded dog

[weltenwellen]

Camille Rankine, "Tender", Incorrect Merciful Impulses

[tamsoj]

Charles Bukowski, "hurry slowly," from Come On In!

[typewriter-worries]

[ Text ID: the seats are empty. the theatre is dark. why do you keep acting? ]

[weltenwellen]

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

[flowerytale]

Jenny Hval, from Girls Against God

[serratedpens]

Katana Smith, "& Nothing Happens"

[weltenwellen]

Rebecca Ross, Divine Rivals

[derangedrhythms]

Natalie Haynes, from 'Stone Blind'

[funeral]

Every person can be considered from two opposite points of view; from the one, they are an individual, beginning and ending in time, fleeting and transitory, “the dream of a shadow,” besides being afflicted with pangs and failings; from the other, they are the indestructible primary being that objectifies itself in every existing thing and as such can say like the statue of Isis at Sais: “I am all that was, and is, and will be.” Such a being, of course, might do something better than manifest itself in a world such as this. For it is the world of finitude, suffering, and death. What is in it and comes out of it must end and die. But what is not out of it and will not be out of it, pierces through it, all-powerful like a flash of lightning which strikes upwards and then knows neither time nor death. To reconcile all these antitheses is really the theme of philosophy.

Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

[pclysemia]

Divine Comedy / La Divina Commedia: Dante and Virgil visit the first two bolge of the 8th circle of Hell (Canto XVIII), illustration by Sandro Botticelli (1480s)