He Just Cried On, This Hopeless Hard Retching As If The Tears Were Shards And Each One Cut As It Came

I wish I had something else. A redemptive imagination

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede

And of course there was music, though it was me and my incessant remembering.

Ada Limón, Banished Wonders

Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Some of the first photographs ever taken inside the Lascaux caves (France, 1947).

the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

I want them to go on kissing, without fear. I want to watch them and not feel so abandoned by hands. Come home. Everything is begging you.

Ada Limón, It Begins With The Trees

the precise sound of a flower bud

- Ross Gay, Weeping

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando