fig and cherry tattoo by gong_greem

On Names and Love

Tennessee Williams, ‘The Vine’ from Selected Stories // Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care // Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People // Stephen Sondheim, ‘Maria’ from West Side Story // Naomi Shihab Nye // Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea // Shilpa Goel // Aidan Chambers, Nik: Now I Know

Ada Limón, from “The Hurting Kind”, The Hurting Kind

Ada Limón, from “Too Close”, The Hurting Kind

“The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.”

— Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”

Susan Sontag, from “The Dummy”, featured in I, Etcetera: Stories

“What the dying too often realize too late, what the dead try to speak back to us from across the river, is that a bowl of cherries passed and received, scrambled eggs cooked for and eaten with someone we love “is everything,” is sacramental, is holy communion, is the touch of love. We don’t go to a church and gather around The Table of New Life because that table alone is holy, nor because that exchange of life and love in the form of bread and wine can only happen there. We go to be reminded that all tables are holy if we pay attention and consecrate them with love and humanity and reverence. All the tables around which we gather with partners, families, friends, classmates, work colleagues, and strangers are potentially sacred meals if we are present and grateful and aware. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber said “One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar.”

— Dan Miller, “The Touch of Love - It Is Everything”

Salman Toor, Three Friends in a Cab, 16 x 20 inches, 2021

from "Filling Spice Jars as Your Wife" by Kai Coggin

—Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World

on lying in bed all day. made of old bedsheets and pillowcases.

[ID: 6 pages of a book made of white fabric. each page has a different quilted design on it in muted colours and a line of embroidered text below, which all together says "cold window air, heating pad tummy. dried sweat, pillow hair halo. things that feel good and bad."]

oh—a heart is a heavy burden

rainer maria rilke / rita dove / my heart is that eternal rose (1989) by patrick tam / mary oliver / george seferis / federico garcía lorca / zarina situmorang / cameron awkward-rich / sylvia plath / jenny slate

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

—Steven Espada Dawson, from Elegy for the Four Chambers of My Brothers Heart

i just dont think we were made to look at ourselves

glenn dean, landscapes of the west / user @petrichara

eurydice - sarah ruhl