WHEN IT DOESN'T HURT

The Kiaat Tree (Pterocarpus angolensis, also called “bloodwood”) releases red sap when cut. Species of Pterocarpus native to southern Africa, in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zaire, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.

“The sound of the saw must be known by the tree.”

An excerpt from something I’m writing

wet evening in April by Patrick Kavanagh

i was sixteen for twenty years

This could be my last report from Gaza by Tareq S. Hajjaj. Please read.

"I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, it's noise exploding, then - silence. Afterwards... I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you... I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child... Do you believe that man grows? No, he is born suddenly - a word, a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road."

Dante in Sardinia by Aria Aber, published in Cero Magazine, April 6, 2022

Louise Glück

~ Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Anis Mojgani, In the Pockets of Small Gods

Sven Jonson (Swedish, 1902-1981), Ljus rymd, 1947. Oil on canvas, 24 x 33 cm

Title page from What Do You See? 1979

anne sexton, “consorting with angels”

Sheila Heti, Pure Color