Come graze my heart's tragic grasses.

THE PARTHENON: former temple on the athenian acropolis, greece, dedicated to the patron goddess athena, (438 b.c.).

Easier to say I can't then to try

Easier to not say hello than it is to say goodbye.

My wings, like iccarus were made of wax

I swore like Orpheus to not look back

I promised like Pandora I wouldn't open up

But like each of them, I melted, I turned

Women, Race and Class - Angela Davis

We real cool: black men and masculinity - bell hooks

Wind up bird chronicle - Haruki Murakami

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander and Cornel West

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to Present - Harriet Washington

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

The autobiography of Malcolm X

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth - Warsan Shire

This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz

I Will Teach You to be Rich - Ramit Sethi

The $100 Start Up: Reinvent the way you make a living, do what you love and create a new future - Chris Guillebeau

Beloved - Toni Morrison

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King

The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women & Self-recovery - bell hooks

Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling MenT

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself (Further reading has both of us recommending take this book with a grain of salt) 

Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type

 Positive Discipline

How to Spot a Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved

Why Is He So Mean To Me? (2nd Edition

The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship: A Toltec Wisdom Book

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help YouFind - and Keep - Love

The 16 Personality Types: Profiles, Theory, & Type Development

. The Highly Sensitive Person

 Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

 Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism

. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

Assata: An Autobiography

Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles

 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth

Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder

Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy (Fully Revised and Updated Fourth Edition)

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition

 The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

 Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality By Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá

Learning All The Time

 The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition

Some other recent books…

41. Malignant Self Love

42. Non-violent communication 

43. The Power of Now

44. Men Who Hate Women And The Women Who Love Them

45. The Complete Book Of Home Organization

― Anna Gavalda, “Life, Only Better” , trans. Tina Kover

“You and I know each other in our bones”

― Kurt Vonnegut, from a letter to Nanny Vonnegut 

“but everyone had this patina

  of slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of

  I think I knew you when we were children,

  this look of I’ve loved you ever since you

were born

  and probably longer than that”

― Paul Hostovsky, from “Everyone was Beautiful,” Dear Truth (Main Street Rag, 2009)

“He’s been here in my heart before I even knew him. Understand? He’s always been here. Always.”

― Sandra Cisneros , from Woman at Hollering Creek: Stories; “Never Marry a Mexican,”

“You came into my life–not as one comes to visit…but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps…”

— Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to Véra Slonim (1923), Letters to Véra

“I love you. I feel as though we were never strangers, you and I, not even for a moment.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Mathilde Trampedach

“Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”

— Robert Brault

“Here when I say “I never want to be without you,”

somewhere else I am saying

“I never want to be without you again.” And when I touch you

in each of the places we meet in all of the lives we are,

it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected.

When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,

in each place and forever.

— Bob Hicok, Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

“She said that she had been searching for my eyes in the crowd because she felt as if she were talking to my heart.”

— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name,” published c. 1982

“Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening…”

|The magic flute|