trust given without being earned loses meaning; the taste of his power is rotten. he tastes it in the smiles of his lovers and the glances of his brother, in the teachers who congratulate his paintings, and the friends who invite him to party after party.

but nie huaisang isn’t truly bitter, not until the day jiang cheng forgets to frown and instead smiles at him, frail trust held out in the way he reached for huaisang’s cheek. and here is all huaisang has ever wanted – a calloused finger tracing his parted lips – only to have it be a farce.

“In the shivery depths I saw a great heart bright as a ruby suspended in the vault by a huge web. It was beating and with each beat there fell to the ground a huge gout of blood. It was too large to be the heart of any living creature. It was larger even than the heart of a god. It is like the heart of agony”. — Henry Miller, from The Colossus of Maroussi. 

“Longs flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift and blow away on the wind, leaving an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle calling mutely through lipless mouth.” — Anne Carson, from The Glass Essay.

“All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; but nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing”. — Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; The Lady of the House of Love.

“It wants our bodies, the landscape does, and everyone runs the risk of being swallowed up. Can we love nature for what it really is: predatory? We do not walk through a passive landscape”. — Richard Siken, from War of The Foxes; Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede.

“With an old red hook in her mouth, the mouth that kept bleeding, into the terrible fields of her soul…” — Anne Sexton, from Live or Die; Consorting with Angels.

“Red, red, mother, you are blood red” .— Anne Sexton, from The Book of Folly; The Death of Fathers.

“I have (…) a seeing that floats within my bones”. — Alice Notley, from Mysteries of Small Houses; 47th Birthday.

“This is the place you would rather not know about, this is the place that will inhabit you, this is the place you cannot imagine, this is the place that will finally defeat you”. – Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written.

“Moon snakes, tongues of the dark speak like bones unlocking, leaves falling of a future you won’t believe in”. — Margaret Atwood, from You Are Happy; The Circe/Mud Poems.

“I know a she who is terrified by butterflies as if they were supernatural. And the divine part of butterflies is terrifying indeed. And I know a he who shivers in horror before flowers – he thinks that flowers are hauntingly delicate like a sigh of nobody in the dark”.— Clarice Lispector, from Água Viva.

“Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.” — C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy.

“Revel in the open country of my wound, break apart its reeds and delicate rivulets”. — Federico García Lorca, [trans. Paul Archer] from Sonnets of Dark Love; Sonnet of the garland of roses.

“Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell – a smell of dying moons and shadows”. — Zelda Fitzgerald, from a letter to Francis Scott Fitzgerald, circa April 15th 1919.

“I am terrified by this dark thing  that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity”.— Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems; Elm.

“The great roots of night grow suddenly from your soul, and the things that hide in you come out again”. — Pablo Neruda, from The Light Wraps You.

“The heart threading a tunnel, a dark, dark tunnel: like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart or collapsing inwards from skin to soul”. — Pablo Neruda, from Death Alone.

“Your life is a painting in a dark museum and sometimes you examine it closely”. — Guillaume Apollinaire, from Zone.

“To what extent we need death—that’s something that can’t be spoken of. How we call on it with our terrified prayers, how we beseech it not to come, with what horror we adore it—no, that can’t be spoken of. We aren’t happy unless it’s lying across our path”.— Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata; Hiss of the Axe.

“On his way the gallow birds asked for food so he killed his horse to give them lunch. They sucked the blood up like whiskey and covered him with promises”. — Anne Sexton, from Transformations; The White Snake.

“All peoples are driven to the point of eating their gods after a time: it’s the old greed for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness, the lust to feel what it does to you when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh, when you swallow it down and you can see with its own cold eyes, look out through murder”.— Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II; Eating Snake.