Rosario Castellanos, tr. by Julian Palley, from Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry; “Presence”

If you can't criticize a particular woman without resorting to female specific slurs, I will never believe that you actually take issue with what she's doing; you just found a target for your misogyny

©Philomena Famulok

Fragment of a memory

...all of the words I wanted to say to him had collected inside me like pearls.

Kyung-sook Shin, from 'I'll Be Right There', tr. Sora Kim-Russell

نصف جمالها عقلها

Half of her beauty is her mind.

bell hooks, from all about love

on purpose. I love you on purpose.

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo / the swan no. 3 / euripides (trans. anne carson) / reassurance

Anaïs Nin, from “The diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 3: 1939-1944”

Trying to make sense of the kind of freedom and tenderness that can only come from so much loneliness

charlotte ager / sean thomas dougherty / félix vallotton / clarice lispector / beya rebaï / may sarton / maria medem / quint buchholz

— Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

Safia Elhillo, from Home Is Not a Country; “Alone”

Mahmoud Darwish, tr. by Sinan Antoon, from “In The Presence of Absence,”

“You said I killed you— haunt me, then! Be with me always— take any form— drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

Emily Brontë, from, “Wuthering Heights,” originally published in 1847

...they saw the sea spread out before them, a gently heaving expanse of deep-piled velvet, supple and sleek as a creature of the wild.

Albert Camus, from 'The Plague', tr. Stuart Gilbert

reborn: journals and notebooks, susan sontag / photograph, ilenia tesoro / “when,” dodie / “(explored),” raychel sonveeco / quote, mary kate teske / “shadow,” marian kloon / “nine,” sleeping at last

alternatively I do think it’s funny to be like

Villain: fool! the prophecy says that no man may kill me!

Trans Man Hero: *ineffectual stabbing*

Trans Man Hero: okay so like. the prophetic acknowledgement of my gender is good but also. very inconvenient right now.

bell hooks, from all about love

Poetry is what helps me remember that even in my fragments, I am whole.

Jennifer Huang, interviewed for Fast Horse

Fyodor Dostoevsky ― Crime and Punishment

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject... Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments