eugh.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Dress

1910s

by Renaud & Cie, Barcelona

Dress

c. 1905

silk crêpe and tabard of embroidered velvet in cottons

by designer Forma (London)

the sister and the siren🐚🫧🦪

White evening dress

c. 1915

catullus 51 is also in sapphic stanzas, so your point about the form (entirely unintentional on my part!) still stands (although the lines of a sapphic stanza do have a specific metrical pattern that is very different to a double dactyl).

i'm being picky about pointing this out because i get people asking if my translations of cat51 are sappho fairly regularly, and this is a good opportunity to talk about some of the differences between the poems. this translation specifically also includes things that are in catullus but not sappho. not an exhaustive list (there are many small differences) but For Example:

the insistence on the man sitting next to the speaker's beloved being really super godlike and also help is it sacrilegious to say that. in sappho 'that man seems to me equal to a god' is one line. in catullus you have that same line and then also like. 'is it divinely acceptable for me to say that the guy could actually defeat the gods.' i really like the use of the word 'fas' (divinely acceptable but also speakable!) because of the turn later in the poem where the speaker (haha) becomes speechless. at the same time: in sappho the (unnamed female) beloved speaks to and laughs at/with the man next to her. in catullus the beloved (lesbia) laughs but does not speak. but arguably catullus is using the triangulation with lesbia to speak to sappho......

'stealing my senses' in my translation is a direct translation of 'eripit sensus mihi' in catullus, which has no equivalent in sappho. sappho does talk about her heartbeat though, and catullus doesn't. i put the bit about the heart skipping a beat in this translation on a whim powered by um. catullus' second stanza is missing its final line, which by comparison with sappho is usually reconstructed as 'vocis in ore' ([there is nothing left of] voice in my mouth). but Who is to say that the missing line of catullus wasn't about his heartbeat? well, me for one. i think the existing reconstruction is good and it's unlikely to be anything else. BUT i like the idea of the poem as a heart, and the missing line as a skipped beat in the pulse of the poem. but i also didn't want a hole in the metre/rhyme scheme of the double dactyls. so i kind of ended up closer to the text of sappho again by trying to translate the imagined similarity inside the difference of the Hole in the text. huh

sappho's fourth stanza (and fragmentary fifth) is completelyyy different from catullus' fourth! sappho's is like. i have died. badly. but it's very much focused on her internal state. catullus' speaker ends by talking generally about 'otium', which is pleasure yes but it's also like. 'not doing the work expected of catullus as an upper class roman man'. and then this sudden swerve to looking back on history thing in the literal final two lines of the poem. i think it would be a stretch to go as far as like, 'catullus' equivalent to sappho feeling like she has died is that the love/self-destruction he experiences around lesbia is powerful enough to prevent him from acting as his gender/class 'should,' and that's kind of city-destroyingly bad to him.' but it's also not not that, yknow? i didn't really do much with this aspect of cat51, but it is a pretty significant departure from sappho 31!

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.