I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without… Continue reading Sylvia Plath
& remember,loneliness is still time spentwith the world. — Ocean Vuong, from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)
In these violent and lazy times, in which we do not live what we live, we are read, we are forcibly lived, far from our essential lives, we lose the gift, we no longer hear what things still want to tell us, we translate, we translate, everything is translation and reduction, there is almost nothing… Continue reading Hélène Cixous
It is dusk. The birds sweep low to the lake and then diveup. The wind picks a few leaves off the groundand turns them into wheels that rolla little way and then collapse. There’s nothing like branchesplanted against the sky to remind youof the feel of your feet on the earth, the way your handssometimes… Continue reading Roo Borson
I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing,… Continue reading Marilynne Robinson
Crude Foyer Thought is false happiness; the ideaThat merely by thinking one can,Or may, penetrate, not may,But can, that one is sure to be able– That there lies at the end of thoughtA foyer of the spirit in a landscapeOf the mind, in which we sitAnd wear humanity’s bleak crown; In which we read the… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
How much of life I have known: love, disillusion, madness, hatred, murderous passions. How to be honest. I see beginnings, flashes, yet how to organize them knowledgably, to finish them. I will write mad stories. But honest. I know the horror of primal feelings, obsessions. — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. (Anchor;… Continue reading Sylvia Plath
the space betweensaying how much i miss everyone i know& pressing my forehead to my kneeis usually smaller than i think.the closest body of watercalls itself a river, but it’s stagnant.i call myself a lot to give,but that’s an exaggeration. — Raena Shirali, from “i know i am in love again when,” No More Potlucks.… Continue reading Raena Shirali
‘Bad luck doesn’t have any chinks in it,’ he said with deep bitterness. ‘I was born a son of a bitch and I’m going to die a son of a bitch.’ ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Harper; 1st edition June 24, 2003)
after Brenda Hillman Always, fire forming.Always, what you have lost in the edges of trees,in the mountaintops: violet. Startle of doe,knocked out dogwood. The woods muddy, unfurl.What cannot be said dark like a sky. Cervidae, Cornus florida.Hills like vowels. My mouth a sea—the body of a field. — Caitlin Neely, “Tinder Language,” Banango Street:… Continue reading Caitlin Neely
The Vale of Soul-Making 