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Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

— Frank Bidart, from “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; 'Guilty of Dust'”, published c. 2017.

Text ID: And I'll always have regrets for everything I do, everything I've gained, everything I've lost, good and bad,

Margaret Atwood, True Stories; from ‘Trainride, Vienna-Bonn’

Text ID: I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.

[text ID: Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort / of horse he had growing up. He said, / Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it / rubbed the bones in the ribs all wrong. / I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers. / I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.]

haruko/love poems: 12:01 am for haruko, june jordan

Anne Sexton, from The Collected Poems; “The Black Art”