He Cried As If Crying Was A Language He Alone Knew And In It There Was Something Urgent He Needed To

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

Ada Limón, Before

You're the muscle / I cut from the bone and still the bone / remembers, still it wants (so much it wants)

Ada Limón, In A Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me

let yourself be a living part of death

Garous Abdolmalekian, Forest tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

of burning but unwasting fire

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

The light is astounding, a hammer.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

Love like the horse chestnut loves carbon,

like the sun isn’t millions of miles away

or doomed. Love like a blue fir amongst white pines,

like a wide shovel opening the earth. Rewind

your favorite moments over early dinners:

the correct identification of an olive tree, climbing

65 feet up a fat trunk, turning backpack pockets

into houses for leaves. Love as eagerly as sprouting seeds,

as hungry as a goat up an argan tree. Love like you are

spotting a red squirrel for the first time. Relish in your blooming

knowledge of Latin, wood chopping, propagation. Love as easy as

hibiscus roots drink rain. Breathe in the smell

of earth-drenched boots. Savor the quick-flowing photos of pheasants and hedgehogs and newts.

Live like a pioneer species. Love like sempervirents: evergreen.

Love like every green thing ever planted

will live long and never burn

- Christina Thatcher, How to Love a Gardener

“I drink to our ruined house To the evil of my life To our loneliness together And I drink to you— To the lying lips that have betrayed us, To the dead-cold eyes, To the fact that the world is brutal and coarse To the fact that God did not save us.”

— Anna Akhmatova, Last Toast, trans. by Kate Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

And your lips rise from the dead in each of my smiles.

Wisława Szymborska, A Sentence tr. Regina Grol

We are the repetitions of the pieces of each other

Garous Abdolmalekian, Game tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

How much more drama can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

Ada Limón, “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”