The Smoke / Carries My Longing / - To Heaven

The rain hovering over the city for days  finally fell. You were arriving after years...

Garous Abdolmalekian, Meeting tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

Until I come to understand that to be saved doesn't mean to save but to survive.

Dagna Ślepowrońska, tr. Regina Grol

thinking about Kait Rokowski writing, "nothing ever ends poetically, it ends and we turn it into poetry. all that blood was never once beautiful. it was just red." and losing it

to want and to wonder are parallel actions

- Jessica Fisher, Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics

I say we but it's just an illusion that our hearts beat in unison

Wisława Szymborska, We tr. Regina Grol

What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

Ada Limón, It’s The Season I Often Mistake

Love like the horse chestnut loves carbon,

like the sun isn’t millions of miles away

or doomed. Love like a blue fir amongst white pines,

like a wide shovel opening the earth. Rewind

your favorite moments over early dinners:

the correct identification of an olive tree, climbing

65 feet up a fat trunk, turning backpack pockets

into houses for leaves. Love as eagerly as sprouting seeds,

as hungry as a goat up an argan tree. Love like you are

spotting a red squirrel for the first time. Relish in your blooming

knowledge of Latin, wood chopping, propagation. Love as easy as

hibiscus roots drink rain. Breathe in the smell

of earth-drenched boots. Savor the quick-flowing photos of pheasants and hedgehogs and newts.

Live like a pioneer species. Love like sempervirents: evergreen.

Love like every green thing ever planted

will live long and never burn

- Christina Thatcher, How to Love a Gardener

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

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

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Much has been said and written about the ‘haiku moment’ - that it blurs the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘self’ and ‘other’; that in it the perception of the essential and accidental, of the beautiful and the ugly, disappears; that it reflects things are they are in themselves.

- Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems