Caitlin Bailey, from Solve for Desire: Poems; “Poppies”

[Text ID: “My body is a bruise, purpled with loss. / I am tired of swallowing your name, / finding ink on each of your shirts, / red petals in the pages of books.”]

The Soft Skin (dir. François Truffaut, 1964)

Gertrud Kolmar, from Dark Soliloquy: The Selected Poems; "Lassan,"

— Anne Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” from Float.

Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away⸺you know?⸺from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood.

James Baldwin  This morning, this evening, so soon  

AE HEE LEE, from "Prelude"

Margaret Atwood, from True Stories: Poems; "Small Poem for the Winter Solstice," originally published in 1981

John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

Rebecca Louise Law | The Flower Garden Display’d | London 2014

Chen Chen, "Sorrow Song with Optimus Prime", When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

citationless behavior

Chelsea Wolfe in “Erde,” dir. by Virginie Khateeb

"Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world."

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

Umang Kalra, "Job Security"

mosque cats x

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking