- On Rebirth, On Finding A Way To Live With The Wrong Heart

Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait in Letters

Nell Stevens, Briefly, A Delicious Life

Ocean Vuong ||| Nickie Zimov

“Do you love him? I don’t know. I believe he is my fate.”

— Anne Carson, excerpt of “TV Men: Akhmatova (Treatment for a Script); AKHMATOVA’S MARRIAGE (1910) HAS LITTLE EFFECT ON HER”, in Men in the Off Hours

Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? / @/oceaii (tumblr) / Liv Ullmann Changing / The Elektra Complex / Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman from "Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry / unknown / @/violentcherries (tumblr) / @/nutnoce (tumblr) / Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea / unknown

i. Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? [ "This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot." ]

ii. @/oceaii (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a deer. The deer looks forwards in the first panel and turns back to face the audience in the second panel. "Turn and face / the person you've become." ]

iii. Liv Ullmann Changing [ "I will never forget the loneliness I knew as a child. For a period in my life I hid behind a mask. Did not want to acknowledge any longing. / Now it is a part of me-something I can share. / Both the loneliness and the longing." ]

iv. The Elektra Complex [ "If you were to peel the skin of me apart as a fig's, you would finally understand. I am my mother's daughter. From poisoned seeds sprout poisoned fruits." ]

v. Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman [ "I didn't want / to be the dead star / that uses borrowed light to survive." ]

vi. unknown [ Black and white illustration of two deer. They are both labeled with words. The deer in the background says "just be." The deer in the foreground replies "just being is the hardest part." ]

vii. @/violentcherries (tumblr) [ "the environment you are not thriving in is not yours forever / IT'S OKAY TO LEAVE / ... / IT'S OKAY to abandon the things you used to love" ]

viii. @/nutnoce (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a scorpion doing chores. It's tail just barely curls over the front of a clothes line. Various pairs of socks hang from the clothes line. It stands before a bucket with more clothes inside. "I come from the toughest, meanest place you can imagine. / I want to be gentle, I want to die gently, but / It seems that when life gets hard / I have to get harder to match." ]

ix. Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea [ "I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar." ]

x. unknown [ "1. Man is a MORAL animal. / 2. You can get human beings to do anything - IF you can convince them it is moral. / 3. You can convince human beings that anything is moral." ]

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?

The Complete Poems; “The Sickness Unto Death”, Anne Sexton//Jean Baudrillard//Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems, Dulce María Loynaz//Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky//Alex Venezia//La Femme de trente ans, Honoré de Balzac//War of the foxes, Richard Siken

Maya Phillips, Sometimes my father is a roaming hunger

“I suffer because of myself. It is my own soul all the time that is bothering me.”

— Henry Miller, from a letter to Anaïs Nin featured in A Literate Passion: Letters Of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller (1932 - 1953)

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

— John Banville, The Sea (via wordsnquotes)

selected diaries, virginia woolf / abandonment (the pair), henri de toulouse-lautrec / pillow thoughts, courtney peppernell / in bed, henri de toulouse-lautrec / work song, hozier / the two friends, henri de toulouse-lautrec / portrait of a lady on fire (2019), dir. céline sciamma