What are we now but voices who promise each other a life neither one can deliver not for lack of wanting but wanting won’t make it so. We cling to a vine at the cliff’s edge. There are tigers above and below. Let us love one another and let go.

Jane Yeh, from Discipline

Mary Karr, “Predictions” [ID in alt text]

Lucie Brock-Broido, Elective Mutes

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (in conversation with Nicolas Truong) trans. Peter Bush [transcript in ALT]

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly and changes nothing. Let me go back to land after a lifetime of going nowhere. This time lodged in the feathers of some scavenging gull white above the black ship that docks and broods upon the oily waters of your harbor. This leaking freighter has brought a hold full of hayforks from Spain, great jeroboams of dark Algerian wine, and quill pens that can’t write English. The sailors have stumbled off toward the bars of the bright houses. The captain closes his log and falls asleep. 1/10’28. Tonight I shall enter my life after being at sea for ages, quietly, in a hospital named for an automobile. The one child of millions of children who has flown alone by the stars above the black wastes of moonless waters that stretched forever, who has turned golden in the full sun of a new day. A tiny wise child who this time will love his life because it is like no other.

Will Harris, from "SAY", Rendang

Adam Zagajewski, trans. by Clare Cavanagh

Ocean Vuong, from “Woodworking at the End of the World”, Time Is a Mother

from "The End" by Emily Berry

[ Text ID: About you there is nothing I wouldn't want to know / With you nothing is simple yet nothing is simpler. ]

Lawrence Raab, ‘Marriage’ from What We Don't Know About Each Other (Penguin Books, 1993)

Athena Farrokhzad

— John Koethe, from “The Reality of the Individual Life,” Beyond Belief: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022)

Poem by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish

Is it just winter or is this worse. Is this the year when outer damp obscures a deeper curse that spring can’t fix, when gears that turn the earth won’t shift the view, when clouds won’t lift though all the skies go blue.