#kafk-a

[kafk-a]

I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to Hortense Flexner and Wyncie King, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

[kafk-a]

Magnificent, somehow. To give in. Wreck yourself so completely. The beauty of it.

Eimear McBride, from The Lesser Bohemians

[kafk-a]

Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it. I just don’t want to die anymore.

Richard Siken, from “Saying Your Names”

[kafk-a]

Reading is anguish, and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it may be (and the more engaging it seems to be), is empty—at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend.

Maurice Blanchot, from The Writing of the Disaster

[kafk-a]

Names of poisons, names of handguns, names of places we’ve been together, names of people we’d be together.

Richard Siken, from “Saying Your Names”

[kafk-a]

You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

Richard Siken, from “Straw House, Straw Dog”

[kafk-a]

You could drown in those eyes, I said, so it’s summer, so it’s suicide, so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.

Richard Siken, from “Little Beast”

[kafk-a]

Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Sylvia Plath, from Elm