there-will-be-a-reckoning

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Devin Kelly, All that wanting, right?

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song of the builders by Mary Oliver

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On being happy despite

| Mary Oliver, "Invitation" | Dao Trong Le, Mineko: rainy days | rawjoy | Mary Oliver, "When Death Comes" | Albert Camus | x3nshit | Nayyirah Waheed | Arthur Wardle, A Bacchante | Tony Hoagland, Application for Release from the Dream

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Joe Bolton, from "Elegy for Roland Barthes" [transcript in ALT]

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Ansel Elkins, from “Autobiography of Eve”

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Maria Popova

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Tony Hoagland, from “Peaceful Transition”, What Narcissism Means to Me

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“I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy.”

— Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

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From Jeanette Winterson's recent substack article

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James Baldwin in conversation with Nikki Giovanni

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I feel so many things growing - my individuality, my confidence; I feel lines of my character growing stronger. I’m really sprouting, springing up, with mixed feelings of tenderness and bitterness, faith and disillusion, hardness and softness. I have never felt so clearly that my self is - obscurely and stubbornly - self-made.

- Anaïs Nin, Linotte

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Mary Oliver, from “Don’t Hesitate.”

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conditions of love: the philosophy of intimacy

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[Text ID: —what then? Will you go on loving, or not?]

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Eight Days in April

by Jewish Lesbian poet Marilyn Hacker

[Full text under the cut]

1.

I broke a glass, got bloodstains on the sheet:

hereafter, must I only write you chaste

connubial poems? Now that I have traced

a way from there to here across the sweet-

est morning, rose-blushed blonde, will measured feet

advance processionally, where before

they scuff-heeled flights of stairs, kicked at a door,

or danced in wing-tips to a dirty beat?

Or do I tell the world that I have got

rich quick, got lucky (got laid), got just what

the doctor ordered, more than I deserved?

This is the second morning I woke curved

around your dreaming. In one night, I've seen

moonset and sunrise in your lion's mane.

2.

Moons set and suns rise in your lion's mane

through LP kisses or spread on my thighs.

Winter subsided while I fantasized

what April dawns frame in the windowpane.

Sweetheart, I'm still not getting enough sleep,

but I'm not tired, and outside it's spring

in which we sprang the afternoon shopping after

I'd been inside you, O so deep

I thought we would be tangled at the roots.

I think we are. (I've never made such noise.

I've never come so hard, or come so far

in such a short time.) You're an exemplar

piss-elegance is not reserved for boys.

Tonight we'll go out in our gangster suits.

3.

Last night we went out in our gangster suits,

but just across the street to Santerello's,

waited past nine for wine. We shone; the fellows

noticed. "You have a splendid linen coat,"

Dimitri told you as he sat us down.

(This used to be my local; now it's chic.)

A restaurant table's like a bed: we speak

the way we do calmed after love, alone

in the dark. There's a lot to get to know.

We felt bad; we felt better. Soon I was

laid back enough to drink around the bend.

You got me home, to bed, like an old friend.

I like you, Rachel, when you're scared, because

you tough it out while you're feeling it through.

4.

You tough it out while while you're feeling it through:

sometimes the bed's rocked over tidal waves

that aren't our pleasures. Everyone behaves

a little strangely when they're in a new

neighborhood, language, continent, time zone.

We got here fast; your jet lag's worse than mine.

I only had Paris to leave behind.

You left your whole young history. My own

reminds me to remind you, waking shaken

with tears, dream-racked, is standard for the course.

We need accommodation that allows

each one some storage space for her dead horse.

If the title weren't already taken,

I'd call this poem "Directions to My House."

5.

I'd call this poem "Directions to My House,"

except today I'm writing it in yours,

in your paisley PJ's. The skylight pours

pale sunlight on white blankets. While I douse

my brain with coffee, you sleep on. Dream well

this time. We'll have three sets of keys apiece:

uptown, downtown, Paris on a sublease.

Teach me to drive. (Could I teach you to spell?)

I think the world's our house. I think I built

and furnished mine with space for you to move

through it, with me, alone in rooms, in love

with our work. I moved into one mansion

the morning when I touched, I saw, I felt

your face blazing above me like a sun.

6.

Your face blazing above me like a sun-

deity, framed in red-gold flames, gynandre

in the travail of pleasure, urgent, tender

terrible—my epithalamion

circles that luminous intaglio

—and you under me as I take you there,

and you opening me in your mouth where

the waves inevitably overflow

restraint. No, no, that isn't the whole thing

(also you drive like cop shows, and you sing

gravel and gold, are street-smart, book-smart,

laugh from your gut) but it is (a soothing

poultice applied to my afflicted part)

the central nervous system and the heart.

7.

The central nervous system and the heart,

and whatever it is in me wakes me

at 5 am regardless, and what takes me

(when you do) ineluctably apart

and puts me back together; the too-smart,

too-clumsy kid glutted on chocolate cakes (me

at ten); the left-brain righteousness that makes me

make of our doubled dailiness an art

are in your capable square hands. O sweet,

possessives make me antsy: we are free

to choose each other perpetually.

Though I don’t think my French short-back-and-sides

means I’ll be the most orthodox of brides,

I broke a glass, got bloodstains on the sheet.

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Czesław Miłosz, "This World"

Translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz & Robert Hass.

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a year. 

january calls me a coward, L.H.  /   february, N.T.  /  to march, emily dickinson  /  an ode to april, @written-honey  /  daydreaming of may, @still-untitled  /  the truth the dead know, anne saxton  /  everything changed when i forgave myself, charlotte eriksson  /  will you be quiet, please? raymond carver  /  turquoise silence, sanober khan  /  untitled, @nightb-us  /  tristesse, gottfried benn (trans. david paisey)  /  the month of december, @voddxa