what my cat reads

useless lesbian | an archive of literary fragments

[whatmycatreads]

“In the still heart, / that refuses nothing, / the world is twice-born—”

—Jane Hirshfield, “Lake and Maple”

[slowheart]

Everyone is asleep

There is nothing to come between the moon and me.

Enomoto Seifu (榎本 星布, 1732-1815) 

[flowerytale]

Margaret Atwood, from “Late Poems”, Dearly

[antigonick]

“In the beginning was the sea—we heard the surf in our breathing, certain that we carried seawater in our veins.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, excerpt of “Traveling Musicians”, in Dancing in Odessa

[apoemaday]

Scheherazade

by Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake                                       and dress them in warm clothes again.          How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses.                    It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,          it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,                  how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple                                                              to slice into pieces. Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means          we’re inconsolable.                                Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light.                                                                 Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

[niimph]

“–Where shall I pour my dream?”

— Lola Ridge, from To The Many; The Collected Poems of L. R.; “Jaguar”

[whatmycatreads]

“I wish you a kinder sea.”

—Emily Dickinson

[soracities]

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

[insomniac-dot-ink]

—Olin Ivory, from a poem “Bad Year Anthem” by Matthew Nienow

But what about the ocean’s intensity that echoes our own,the fever in cold weather, the soul’s descent? What about the weight of the angels’ wings?

—Etel Adnan, from Night 

Poetry of the Sea

[women-loving-art]

Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

[luthienne]

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

[intimatum]

Ada Limón, What I Didn’t Know Before

[whatmycatreads]

"Mekong Song" by Sokunthary Svay

[luthienne]

“…and I wanted, in a messy, maddening way, to go on forgetting myself and yet, to find myself too.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

[whatmycatreads]

Layli Long Soldier, "Obligations 2"

[whatmycatreads]

“How reckless, the way that I love / like the first chapter of a ghost story. / Like the gentlest hand / reaching out of a grave.”

—Brenna Twohy, “Anxiety: A Ghost Story”

[luthienne]

“Then I withdrew. Evaded the touch of real people as I would do for a long time to come. Needed and demanded to be unapproachable.”

— Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (tr. Jan van Heurck)