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Nicole Homer, ed. by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes, from Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women: A World Poetry Anthology; "Wait"

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Rose Flint, ed. by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes, from Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women: A World Poetry Anthology; "Black Wind"

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“A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability… …whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” it’s meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

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— Calla Quinn

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Headless John The Baptist Hitchhiking, C.T. Salazar

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Louise Charlin Perrin Labé, from The Selected Poems; "Sonnet XVIII,"

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James Baldwin, from Just Above My Head (1979)

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Ivan Bunin, tr. by Richard Hare, from Dark Avenues & Other Stories; “Musa,”

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Natalie Dunn

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— Anna Akhmatova, In a Dream, tr. by Lenore Mayhew & William McNaughton

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eurydice - sarah ruhl

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“How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours — with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it — and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret — so sharp! — that we haven’t lived through it together — whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissible — or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road — you see what I mean, my happiness?”

— Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to Véra Nabokov, Letters to Véra, ed. and trans. Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)

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love & isolation are so strange because in solitude, u create all these perfect scenarios for your imaginary darling—you would cut them fruit & dance in the kitchen & always kiss them twice in case the first one doesn't take properly—but as soon as you're given the chance, you fumble. it's so mortifying, having not practiced but taken so much time to plan it out, & you finally get your shot & you can hardly hold their hand or meet their eyes. you want love so badly & you've been deprived of others for so long, your actual capability is distorted. you wince at their touch or can only leave them small gifts when you're out of the room. the intensity increases, the thought that you don't deserve softness heightens. it's a terrible cycle: wanting & wanting & letting that want turn to a festering that ruins it before you can reel yourself back

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“You used to hand me scraps of kindness, and I would gnaw on them for days.”

— Nicola Maye Goldberg, from “Biathanatos,” published in Luna Luna