What the Living Do, Marie Howe
— Penelope’s Song, Louise Glück
[text ID: Who wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite could you possibly fail to answer?]
"It is August: the true ending of a year. I've grown sick from trying to love who I am."
-Carlie Hoffman, from "High Bridge Park," published in Gulf Stream
Ari Banias, from Anybody: Poems; “Bouquet”
[Text ID: “Today you want nothing / because wanting / comes too close to feeling.”]
Katherine Larson, from Radial Symmetry; “Gardens in Tunisia”
[Text ID: “There are days that walk through me / and I cannot hold them.”]
“I think you lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you’re living a different kind of life there. In a world inside you.”
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
—On Love, Marina Tsvetaeva
[text ID: I just want a humble, murderously simple thing: that a person be glad when I walk into the room.]
𝙻𝚘𝚛𝚍 𝙱𝚢𝚛𝚘𝚗, 𝙲𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚍𝚎 𝙷𝚊𝚛𝚘𝚕𝚍'𝚜 𝙿𝚒𝚕𝚐𝚛𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚐𝚎 [𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚙𝚞𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚑𝚎𝚍 𝟷𝟾𝟷𝟸]
[ID: There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, END ID]
Guillermo Saavedra, from “On the Tomato,” trans. Cindy Schuster, in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky [ID in alt text]
— Conversations about Home (At the Deportation Centre), Warsan Shire
[text ID: My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing.]
