I Read The Flecks In Your Eyes

“Of course, she must be sleeping, sleeping deeply, wrapped in the darkness of that strange little world of hers.”

— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Just because I worked there does not mean I am not sick

I should be institutionalized, but I know all of their tricks

(I know I’m slipping further into mental illness to an alarming degree but I’m too traumatized from working in a psychiatric hospital to seek more intensive help than my weekly therapy and nightly Lexapro. I saw how my patients were treated and I quit because of it. Becoming one of them is a terrifying prospect)

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.

Pittsburgh Daily Post, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1927

Roman Widow - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874 (details)

Crawling out of the swamps where you buried me like the setting sun and the moon rises an enemy.

Carolina Outcrop. Never Trust a Woman Who Writes.

Come, shining lyre, speak to me--gain the power of utterance. ἄγι δὴ χέλυ δῖα μοι λέγε φωνάεσσα δὲ γίνεω. --Sappho, fr. 118

Nicole W. Lee, from "Even the Dust"

The Pittsburgh Press, Pennsylvania, January 14, 1935