love in the time of cholera, gabriel garcía márquez // carmilla, joseph sheridan le fanu // letter of testimony, octavio paz (trans. eliot weinburger) // planet of love, richard siken // the queen of carthage, louise glück // excerpt from a letter to fanny brawne, john keats // little weirds, jenny slate // clarification, franz wright // sonnet lxvi, pablo neruda (trans. ilan stavans) // gone: poems, fanny howe.
Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)
[Text ID: It’s a ghost story. Is it frightening? No, but it’s a bit sad.]
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." ]
WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY KILL, THAT YOU LOVED SO MUCH THAT IT WOULD MAKE THE SUN RISE AGAIN?
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous / Rumi / George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones / CNS, We are beauty and fire; ash we may be, but we are stronger than them. / Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch / Rina Sawayama, Dynasty / Benjamin West, Death on the Pale Horse (1817) / Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina / Eugenio Montale, The Storm / Succession HBO Opening Credits / Bernard Knox, Introduction to The Iliad / Into the Badlands AMC / Succession HBO S01E08 “Prague” / c.d., You do, you know. You deserve peace. / Kahlil Gibran, Defeat
All of us like stairs, one step after another, going up, going down, but always going the same way.
Letter to My Rage: An Evolution - Lidia Yuknavitch / Lady Snowblood / Autumn Sonata (x) / The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera / On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong / Milk and Honey - Rupi Kaur / The Joy Luck Club / Enough - Suzanne Buffam / x / The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch / Lake Mungo / Family Tree (Intro) - Ethel Cain
Lee Hyemi, tr. by Soje, from Unexpected Vanilla; “Inside the tower”
[Text ID: “Why am I / inside this absence”]