this is the moon. this is the sun.

—

Elías Nandino, from “Property Rights,”

Elías Nandino: Selected Poems, in Spanish and English

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, Complete Poems

• “Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”

— Anne Carson, from “On Hedonism”

• “Forgive me my grief / that spans out acres. / I have love the size of / a church, & no one to / give it to.”

— Ana Carrizo, “Reflections”

• Anaïs Nin, from “Fire”

• “The hardest thing still remains. It remains the hardest, to bear all the tenderness and only to gaze on.”

— Ilse Aichinger, from “Mirrorstory”

• “I, with my romantic need and longing.”

— Susan Sontag, from a diary entry

• “It’s no fun being in love with a shadow. You must be somewhere in this world. God would not have made a heart like mine and not have made its mate. It would be too cruel.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millais, from a diary entry

• Kim Addonizio, from “Onset”

• “I’ve been missing her for so long, it’s come to seem that wanting anything must be only another way of wanting her.”

— Sarah Waters, from Tipping the Velvet

• “I keep wishing for you, keep shutting up my eyes and looking toward the sky, asking with all my might for you, and yet you do not come. I thought of you, until the world grew rounder than it sometimes is, and I broke several dishes.”

“My heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts.”

— Emily Dickinson, from personal letters

• “My mind is filled with dreams of romantic meetings.”

— Virginia Woolf from a letter to Vita Sackville-West

• “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.”

— Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf

• “The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.”

— Mikko Harvey, from “For M”

• “When my beloved calls my name— in the bathtub, in her bed, over the telephone, into a microphone or my ear— it closes my eyes, buckles me, thralls my insides with the sweet terror of being recognized. Sometimes, we cannot bear the thing we crave.”