'Come Close To Me, Come Closer. I Promise It Will Be Beautiful.'

If I had a prayer, it would say, Let this not be a mirror to the past, nor a window to the future. Let each night be only itself.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

- take it all / - it’s too little

- Agata Tuszyńska, 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 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

How imagining death can make it easier 

to live and I agree and say, It’s called die

before you die.

- Ada Limón, The Long Ride

It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

Winter is king, raindrops sing, gardens drip with loss.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty

I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

the smoke / carries my longing / - to Heaven

Barbara Brandys, By the Fire tr. Regina Grol