old friends and their fingerprints all over your life

Richard Siken, “Planet of Love”

You could tell your tale differently this time, I suppose. But you won’t. Your name will always be Ivan Nikolayevich. You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar, below her eye,  and  wonder where  she  got  it.  You  will  always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again. I am only here to make sure it happens.

— Saeed Jones, “Boy Found Inside A Wolf” Prelude to Bruise

(Blackness isn’t black. It is the last degree of reds. The secret blood of reds.)

— Hélène Cixous, “Bathsheba or the Interior Bible” (translated from the French by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray)

When Homer mentions blood, blood is black.


—  Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Have you seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black.”

happy holidays may the end of this year bring you relief and 2026 be everything you wish for 🤍

“Advent” by Heather Christle

“i am running into a new year” by Lucille Clifton

“Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye

“Prayer for the New Year” by Rhiannon McGavin

“Resolution #1,003” by June Jordan

“For the New Year, 1981” by Denise Levertov

“On Exiting Universitätsspital Zürich, New Year’s Eve 2015” by Charif Shanahan

“Rain, New Year’s Eve” by Maggie Smith

“New Year’s Eve At The Santa Fe Hotel, Fresno, California” by Larry Levis

“New Year’s Day” by Audre Lorde

“For Janet, at the New Year” by Ellen Bass

“New Year” by Kate Baer

— Sappho, Fragments (ca. early 6th century BC)

“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak….It was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.”

— Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams (1942) 

“Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones’s eyes.”

Kaveh Akbar, ‘Do You Speak Persian?’

“I can’t speak my own language - Iesu, All those good words; And I outside them.”

R.S. Thomas, ‘Welsh’

“It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,” called “Loss of the Homeplace and the Defilement of the Beloved,” called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs”.”

Li-Young Lee, ‘Immigrant Blues’

“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.”

A BLURRED LOVE