bite the hand that starves you

[newvision]

— James Baldwin from Giovanni’s Room (1956)

[pollen]

Mary Oliver, from "Such Singing in the Wild Branches"

[theoceanislikeyou]

Oh Mary. You always save us, even now.

[softhe4rted]

to begin with, the sweet grass by mary oliver, from “devotions”

[wovi]

*

joy sullivan

[you-can-be-what-you-want-to-be]

"Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world."

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

[weltenwellen]

An Interview with Richard Siken

[feral-ballad]

Aria Aber, from Hard Damage; “Operation Cyclone”

[desertarchipelago]

James Baldwin

[fadedlovemp3]

Jenny Holzer vs. Wallace Stegner

[sfsolstice]

Carl Phillips, from "Everything All of It," in Then The War

[existential-celestial]

“Yet for all its coldness, there’s a tenderness in winter too, making us cover what we can no longer bare.”

— Carole Glasser Langille, from “Next Month Snow,” In Cannon Cave (Brick Books, 1997).

[mournfulroses]

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena Jesenka featured in "Letters to Milena,"

[heartpdf]

[weltenwellen]

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

[weltenwellen]

Maya C. Popa, “Letters in Winter”, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Mary Kate Teske

[cavatas]

"An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word 'love' — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.

— Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978