those boxes we all have

Iceland: Landmannalaugar, Suðurland

USA. NYC. Winter night in a bar. 1985 Ferdinando Scianna

by Denny Bitte

Andrew Moore, Golden Valley Norwegian Lutheran Church, Perkins County, South Dakota, 2013

Dorianne Laux

-Tracy K. Smith, excerpt from “Interrogative” from Duende

Mikhail Nesterov, The Nightingale Is Singing

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and these are the forces they had ranged against us, and theses are the forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us, against us and within us.

Kissing Her on the Grass (1900) by Wojciech Weiss

(isla grande, colombia;  last month)

— Claire-Louise Bennett, “The Deepest Sea” in Pond

And you want to be my latex salesman.