And I Never Knew Survival Was Like That. If You Live, You Look Back And Beg For It Again, The Hazardous

It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outward from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

i) robert browning / eurydice to orpheus (1864) ii) w.a. mozart / “parto, parto” (la clemenza di tito, 1791) iii) jessica waldoff / recognition in mozart’s operas (2006) iv) c.w. gluck / orfeo ed euridice (1762) v) catherine maxwell / the female sublime from milton to swinburne: bearing blindness (2001) vi) gerald griffin / the collegians (1829) film stills from portrait de la jeune fille en feu (sciamma, 2019)

We teeter / on the brink of time, you and I, he, she, / all of us, all so worthy of pity.

Maria Bigoszewska, tr. Regina Grol

and the moon is the mouth of a lover

Garous Abdolmalekian, Acquiescence tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

the tenderness…. 

The world is slow to dissolve and leave us.

Matthea Harvey, Sad Little Breathing Machine

knuckle tats say FOUC AULT

burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

and how it's hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

Ada Limón, Mowing

Never finish a war without starting another.

Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Field