when the moon is ready, she will drown you.

miri/am.

[mournfulroses]

Anne Michaels, from "Infinite Gradation," originally published in October 2017

[lies]

I Go Back to May 1937

by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

[shisasan]

May 8, 1963 Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters First published: 1977

[on-poetry]

Well, here it was, then: longing, missing. The most useless kind of love.

—Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

[flowerytale]

Susan Sontag, from “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963″

[reallyxlikedxyourxpost]

I was a woman who thought of dead things. All the time. I couldn't help it.

Lidia Yuknavitch, from The Chronology of Water: A Memoir.

[weltenwellen]

Louise Glück, from ""Averno", Averno

[petaltexturedskies]

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol.III: 1939-1944

[weltenwellen]

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

[geryone]

Poems From An Email Exchange, Hanif Abdurraqib

[aridante]

“Or was my rage my mother’s? Or her mother’s? Or hers? An inherited creature?”

— Letter to My Rage: An Evolution, by Lidia Yuknavitch

[antigonick]

“This is my heart. Even if I can no longer use it … It’s my heart.”

— Naomi Kawase, from the screenplay Radiance (Comme des Cinéma & Kino Films, 2017)

[luthienne]

“It’s not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It’s like being alive, only colder. Things taste less. They feel less. You forget, little by little, who you were.”

— Catherynne M. Valente, from Deathless

[soracities]

Marina Tsvetaeva, excerpt from Poem of the End, Selected Poems (trans. Elaine Feinstein, with Angela Livingstone) [ID'd]

[soracities]

“She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”

— Angela Carter, from “The Lady of the House of Love”, The Bloody Chamber

[soracities]

Marina Tsvetaeva, from "Bus", Selected Poems (trans. Elaine Feinstein, with Simon Franklin) [ID'd]

[letsbeapoemtogether]

Susan Sontag, from "The Dummy", featured in I, Etcetera: Stories