We Are The Repetitions Of The Pieces Of Each Other

Tomorrow either I will murder you or you will rinse the knife in water

Garous Abdolmalekian, Flashback tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

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

Detail - Angels “Ghent Altarpiece” finished 1432, Jan van Eyck.

The light is nervous and quiet -

Urszula M. Benka, To the Last Man on Earth, In the Hour of His Death tr. Regina Grol

the whole world around me expanding and contracting, visually and viscerally heaving.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

FOR RENT: / an empty sky

- Agata Tuszyńska, Classified Ads tr. Regina Grol

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me. The world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign & re-create myself…” 

I lay exhaling human feelings

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

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