@i.cpl

Emily Dickinson // Virginia Woolf

“It’s this feeling that you want to love strangers, that you want to kiss the man at the post office, or the woman at the dry cleaners—you want to wrap your arms around life, life itself, but you can’t, and this feeling wells up in you, and there is nowhere to put this great happiness—and you’re floating—and then you fall down and become unbearably sad. And you have to go lie down on the couch.”

• “Candy Toss,” 2000 | Justine Kurland 
• “Women in the Rain,” 2005 | Marina Abramović
• “Dairy Queen,” 2000 | Justine Kurland 

• “Water For The People,” 2020 | Paul D'Amato
• “New York,” 1967 | Robert Lebeck
• “Water For The People,” 2020 | Paul D'Amato

• “Forest,” 1998 | Justine Kurland
• “Bathers,” 1998 | Justine Kurland 
• “Kung Fu Fighters,” 1999 | Justine Kurland 

[text ID: I’ve been saying goodbye to everything. The artichokes on my kitchen counter — tiny hearts quivering under a knife, my grandmother’s aging knees — persistent and achy, the way my mother sometimes looks at the sky — all glimmer and home. In dreams, my car drives backwards, I run too slow, I am sitting atop a streetlight, smashing a bulb between my teeth. I’ve been exercising my body away. Here, take this machine called my sadness. Toss it in a lullaby, it needs tenderness, spring, maybe a little hymn to hum it to sleep. Zina’s favorite flower was sunflowers. They’ve been following me around everywhere I go. A decade’s past. My best friend and I are breaking up, but I’ve been grieving for so long my eyes become flutes. I wish to ask my grandfather what happens after we die, but everything I say sounds like a quiver. It’s so hard being a person. I promised Zina she’d live forever. She gave me the sun instead.]