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Loneliness resonates in the same part of the brain as physical pain.

Andrea Gibson

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Sometimes, you forget the way the sky tastes

after a good rain. The way a body of water holds you like a lover. That you can catnap inside a sun- beam. You can butter both sides of the bread. You can lick the salt from a wound. Sometimes, you forget how alive

the pain made you feel. Forget what was so goddamn awful about yesterday’s news. Forget you can breathe through your skin or make love without breaking a sweat. Forget the sound of his voice when he comes

in from the cold. How the careless lines of his mouth never quite fit yours. That tears aren’t always a sign of remorse. That silence is often more lethal than words.

Sometimes, you find yourself at the edge of the ocean and the ache to drown is so familiar, you forget you were born knowing how to swim.

- cora finch

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Czeslaw Milosz, from "Ars Poetica?"

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'A Passage to India' by E. M. Forster (published in 1924)

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WHAT TO SAY TO THOSE WHO THINK YOU'RE A FOOL FOR CHOOSING POETRY by Joseph Fasano

Tell them yes. Tell them poetry is what chose you. Tell them you had a night once, just as they did, when you knelt alone on the cold tiles and asked the night to give you a reason for being. Tell them the answer was your life. Tell them we are nothing without passion, the wild dark flock that fills our rooms with joy. Tell them you will give the rest of your blazing days to try to give another life that moment that moment when you opened to the coldness and found that the music of your ruin was to beautiful to ever be destroyed.

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“What does poetry save you from?” after Linda Pastan

From forgetting the taste of sunlight or the sound of birds.

From drowning in a pool of blue thoughts.

From going entire days without anyone touching my heart.

From lying on the floor and never getting back up.

From nothing. From the blank stare of an empty page and the grey in your eyes.

- cora finch

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Florence and the Machine, from South London Forever

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Prelude

The popular lanes move on but leave their reflection.

The popular lanes move on but leave us the wind.

The wind lies shrouded full length beneath the sky.

But floating on the rivers it has left its echoes.

The world of fireflies has invaded my memories.

And a tiny little heart is sprouting at my fingertips.

- Federico Garcia Lorca

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— Poems for Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva (new versions from the russian by ilya kaminsky and jean valentine)

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"A thunderstorm. Irises purple against the clouds."

~ Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary (13th May 1935)

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SPRING BEGINS SHYLY

Spring begins shyly With one hairpin of green grass In a flower pot.

- Richard Wright, from This Other World

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Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband

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45. This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can't answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn't love then I am forced to admit that I don't know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

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44. [...] later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man every completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

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42. [...] trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

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36. [...] Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance. And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

Maggie Nelson, Bluets