I Do Not Believe That There Was Ever A Question Of Being Abstract Or Representational. It Is Really A

FOR RENT: / an empty sky

- Agata Tuszyńska, Classified Ads tr. Regina Grol

I remember thinking my father was mean but knowing he was kind. I remember thinking my father was kind but knowing he was mean.

Mary Ruefle, Woodtangle

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

knuckle tats say FOUC AULT

of loveliness in the snow and faithlessness in the flood;

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

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

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

Sharon Olds, “True Love”

Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he'd admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it,

Ada Limón, Cyrus & The Snakes

I want to learn to navigate by stars that have nothing to do with me

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book