#lit excerpt

[erotizmas]

love (1971) by angela carter

[words-and-coffee]

There is a wildfire starving on top of a lake. See how the water holds fire but cannot end it? We insist on love when all we want is mercy

Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything - The Lovers

[archersea]

kitchen, banana yoshimoto.

[contremineur]

lovers whose bodies smell of each other

T.S. Eliot, from A dedication to my wife (in ‘The elder statesman’, Faber & Faber 1959)

[joanofarc1928]

[sinvw5]

'"How did you fix it?"

"Just time," he said, shrugging. "They say time heals all wounds."

I remembered that some people saw time as a flat line rather than a circle and allowed myself to envy him for a moment. "Does it?" I said vaguely.

"Maybe not. It healed that one, at least."

The concession warmed me. "It must be hard work to memorize your lines."

"It's easier when the words follow a meter."

So that was the source of his pleasing, distinct cadence. He must hear meter in everything. Without warning, a sweep of loneliness took me, exquisite enough that my breath caught. I stood still and covered my eyes.' - Madeleine Nakamura, Angel Eye (listen I know I reversed punctuation but I was not about to waste a quarter spoon going back to fix it. sort it yourself.)

[sinvw5]

"If I make room for pain to architect care, and violence to dilate and deepen meaning, and I have nightmares residing alongside my other domestic occupants, not in the basement but in whichever room they prefer, then don't I live in a house that protects dreaming of all kinds?" Johanna Hedva on care through kink, the erasure aspects of capitalist self care culture, and the refusal to self erase for performative healing - from the book 'How To Tell When We Will Die'

[sinvw5]

"A monstrous figure blocked the doorway, wings splayed, and the gargoyle let out a howl that came from every direction and multiple dimensions at once."

From The Library of The Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith

(purrr.)