A Great Hope Fell You Heard No Noise The Ruin Was Within Oh Cunning Wreck That Told No Tale And Let No

Circe by John Collier (1885)

Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, 1940

Ossuaries, Dionne Brand

Pittsburgh Daily Post, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1927

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

in front of my mother and my sisters, i pretend love is cheap and vulgar. i act like it's a sin — i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. but at night i dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb — i dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.

— "salt", salma deera

Henri Gervex, Rolla (detail), 1878.

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux.

Design

by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth -- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall? -- If design govern in a thing so small.