From Behind A / Pillar / Of Unarrived / Moments

I stare, recognize the ghost of old feelings. ‘What do I remember / that was shaped / as this thing is shaped?’

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

of burning but unwasting fire

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I take the soil in

my clean fingers and to say

I weep is untrue, weep is too

musical a word. I heave

into the soil. You cannot die.

I just came to this life

again, alive in my silent way.

- Ada Limón, Invasive

When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.

Richard Siken, Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede

what I have done is risked everything for that hour, that hour in the black night, where one flashing light looks like love,

Ada Limón, Glow

My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn't know then that it wasn't even love I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Ada Limón, Calling Things What They Are

I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there,

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Does the earth fill the mouths of the dead to stop them from describing what they've seen?

Garous Abdolmalekian, Long Poem of Loneliness tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey