hands down

Pleasant Burden, 1895, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

FEMALE BODY AS HAUNTED HOUSE

Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

Sarah Smeltzer, Women, Trauma, and Haunted Houses

Emily Dickinson, One Need Not be a Chamber to be Haunted

Parul Sehgal, ‘In the Dream House’ Recounts an Abusive Relationship Using Dozens of Genres

Jacui Germain

Rachel Eve Moulton, On the Haunted Lives of Girls and Women

— Margarita Karapanou, Rien ne va Plus (tr. by Karen Emmerich).

The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out.

–– Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it.”

of me, my trans sympathetic nervous

system, my trans fatigue

cracks, my trans 1st Corinthians 3:16 training

the god right out of my trans temple,

all trans dove, no savior; a trans baptism, holy

to be a fire (trans) trembling in the tear of the trans (daughter, trans) tongue.

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Give me blood and rage and / a heart for horror; teach me to be / tough enough to face this world / still standing. Make a Fury of me.”

Elizabeth Hewer, from “Finding Ariadne” in Wishing for Birds

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Mumford & Sons, “Lover’s Eyes”

“A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself,”

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“…is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“We, hurt by ourselves, keen / to be hurters and keen / to be hurt back deep inside. / We, like weapons laid / beside anger asleep.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke; “Antistrophes” (tr. Edward Snow)

“…she did not allow herself tears. When she did cry, she would explain her tears in this way: ‘I am not weeping, I am bursting with rage.’”

Gabriella Fiori, from Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography

“Isn’t all that rage so ugly? / And isn’t it mine, still? / Good god, isn’t it mine?”

Ashe Vernon, from “Buried,” Not a Girl

Ada Limón, from “The Good Fight”

“What are we made of but hunger and rage?”

Instead of, “I forgive you, I know you meant well,” we accept the fruit with soft eyes; compliment its sweetness, exclaim - “you always pick the best watermelon – how do you just know?” As though there really existed a secret knock you could rat against a rind; to hear its hollowness; to determine the composition of a perfect cantaloupe.

But, when the fruit is gone, or the treason too irresolvable, we apologise for each other: “you know he didn’t mean it.” Then, it is the flitting of remorseful eyes at the dinner table, from the guilty party, which provides non-verbal confirmation of the fact.

The walls of our pride are built so stubbornly high, sometimes I think it would take a homicide to climb them.

In this house, love is subtle. That does not mean it is ever absent. From a young age, I learn to read between the lines. On balance, I think that is a good thing.

Now I know that not everybody communicates in the same way.

I know that sometimes, love sounds like “I am proud of you”; like “I trust you to know what is right”; that it feels like a space to grow; a sandbox to practice falling over in. Other times, it sounds like chemistry lessons at the dining table; like giving up cigarettes; like a drive to the airport at 3am; or working, some nights, until dawn - to pay for your education, then getting up the following morning to make a packed lunch.

Sometimes love does not sound like “sorry” or “I love you”, when those things are too difficult to say.

Sometimes love is just silence and soft eyes. 

Sometimes love is a bowl of fruit.