My Jaw Has Unhinged Itself Again.

A great Hope fell You heard no noise The Ruin was within Oh cunning Wreck That told no tale And let no Witness in

The mind was built for mighty Freight For dread occasion planned How often foundering at Sea Ostensibly, on Land

A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my Life had entered it And there were troughs beside -

A closing of the simple lid That opened to the sun Until the tender Carpenter Perpetual nail it down -

Emily Dickinson, from Envelope Poems

wet evening in April by Patrick Kavanagh

“As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

– Pablo Neruda

Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing. A memory to someone. A home to a life.

Nayyirah Waheed

Corner of Liberty and Fifth Avenues 12:10 PM, Pittsburgh, ca. 1940

Franciszek Żmurko - Morning star.

Pittsburgh Daily Post, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1927

To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self - Elisa Gonzales

Sometimes you feel more intimacy with the woman who lives

in the apartment opposite—twenty years older, probably,

though she looks barely ten, devoted to evading age—

than with anyone stroked or kissed or otherwise handled.

You sit naked on the white sofa, lights on, looking into her home,

lights on.

She paints her toenails, watches a black-and-white film,

Hitchcock, maybe: there’s a woman with a platinum chignon.

She applies a green mask. A cream. A mystery ointment.

When you meet an older woman who resembles her, enough,

you do the obvious thing.

That woman says, after, Don’t ever leave me

but when you report to your friends

you change her words to Don’t ever forget me.

Typical of us, the lie and the lie.

Why couldn’t you tell the truth? That’s what I’ve come to ask.

Not to her—to your friends.

I can’t remember why it embarrassed you.

Was it that she was old enough not to bare her throat?

Or was it shame at yourself, for misunderstanding

how well you were understood?

(It always comes back to knowledge with us, doesn’t it?)

Maybe it doesn’t matter: you’ll think of this woman

so often throughout the years

that by some lights

you’ll have kept your vow.

Sappho, tr. by Anne Carson, from “If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho,” (x)

Flying like a fish out of water

Sea levels rising as the earth gets hotter

I think this weekend I’ll go on an alcohol bender

But at least drinks are free when you’re the bartender.