[bugqiu]

Doctors Psychiatrists Teachers Policemen Lawyers will all try to pull your ass back to earth, to sedate your delirium, but you gotta resist the pull of administrators and their senators. Ask yourself, Do you like the way it means so much? And if your answer is yes, politely refuse their offerings of anchors and maps.

— Jackie Wang, Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun

[likeagrapefruit]

mary oliver already said everything

[beguines]

Robin Walter, Little Mercy

[beguines]

Tom Hennen, "Love for Other Things", Darkness Sticks to Everything

[apoemaday]

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?

by Linda Pastan

Isn’t the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn’t the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn’t banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask “Why are you sad so often?” Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.

[havingapoemwithyou]

It Was Beirut, All Over Again by Etel Adnan

[metamorphesque]

Colorless Musings, Tathev Simonyan

[funeral]

Zoltán Kőváry, Applications of Existential Psychology, Vol. 2

[havingapoemwithyou]

I translate the names of boys killed in Gaza by Ghinwa Jawhari

[petaltexturedskies]

Like Psyche I lived for awhile in an enchanted palace, amidst odours, and music, and every luxurious delight; when suddenly I was left on a barren rock; a wide ocean of despair rolled around me: above all was black, and my eyes closed while I still inhabited a universal death.

Mary Shelley, Mathilda

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

"What are you looking at?" she asked.

"Your legs," I said. "Would you like some wine?"

"No thanks. My mother told me never to accept wine from strangers." She looked right through me.

"I take what I can get from strangers," I said. "Because I'm a stranger, too."

– John Kessel, from “The Pure Product,” Meeting in Infinity: Allegories and Extrapolations (Arkham House, 1992)

[hineinihineini-moving]

October by Mary Oliver

[havingapoemwithyou]

grinding the lens by Linda Gregg

[petaltexturedskies]

When you love someone as much as that, you don't believe they can die. You think your love protects them.

Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude

[weltenwellen]

CJ Scruton, "Ars Poetica for West Tennessee"

[sidneysheldon]

Sidney Sheldon, "The Other Side of Midnight"

[weltenwellen]

Louise Glück, from “The Sensual World”, Poems 1962 - 2012