La virgen loca

The photo was taken by photographer Claude Azoulay in Paris in 1961, when she was sitting in a cafe on Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying — He had always taken funerals in his stride — And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

After Queenie died, he went into a deep depression and eventually died from complications borne of heavy drinking and grief.

Warwick, England

It’s so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them when you don’t love them anymore.

Oil on canvas.

Don’t be an actor. God observes you violent in a scene and, thinking it is real, mistakenly adds you to Hell. This happens all the time. It’s like when I traveled across eight states in shattering pain to curl beside S as she left this Earth, only to later have a dream I’d instead stayed home eating fruit cups and sewing a patch on my jeans. I didn’t know a dream could undo a true event, uncement it, but it did — from then on, I hadn’t gone, and how do I live with myself now, I ask each day —

📷 © Valeria Luongo

Glimmerati, Claudia Keep

I love May. The world around gets green in a matter of days and suddenly everything is blooming!

Blessing of animals, Iglesia Santa Cruz Acatlán, Mexico City, 1949. Armin Haab

Night melt