embrace

Briony Marshall (Peaceful embrace or the melting of boundaries), Stephan Sinding (To Mennesker), Gustav Vigeland (Kiss), William Zorach (Embrace), Antonio Canova (Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss)

I am a girl of pony hair—a bagful of ribbon. when I dress the wounds, when I dress myself with figs and coffee berries, I get so very emotional about you. I care so very much, I just want to know you are good and alive—here at day break, broken.

— Emily Corwin, from “tenderling,” published in Drunk Monkeys

“On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars—Something good will come out of all things yet—And it will be golden and eternal just like that—There’s no need to say another word.”

— Big Sur, Jack Kerouac (via existential-celestial)

What do you think of fragility? Is it a bad thing? To be fragile sometimes?

i don’t think so, i think fragility, along with softness, is a good thing. it’s absolutely healthy to let oneself be fragile and soft, open to a certain degree of hurt, yes, but open nevertheless. i don’t think keeping oneself from feeling fragile does any good, on the contrary. there’s this poem by mary oliver i always come back to in which she says “i tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world” and that’s the way i feel about fragility

77, ee cummings

Forugh Farrokhzad, tr. by Sholeh Wolpé, from Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad; “On Loving”

[Text ID: "I'm so filled with you / I want to run through meadows, / bash my head against mountain rocks, / give myself to ocean waves. / I'm so filled with you / I want to crumble into myself like a speck of dust, / to gently lay my head at your feet, / cling fast to your weightless shadow."]

Topaz Winters, from Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing; “50 Words for Snow”

[Text ID: “Oh, sweetheart. My foolish / hope. My sun-swallowed sky. / My spine & how it aches for you / again & again, swelling, brimming, / thick-as-honey sunflower static.”]

Rosario Castellanos, tr. by Magda Bogin, from The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos; "The splendor of being"

[Text ID: "Ah, to wake, to live, / to love, to love the wind / as a bird loves!"]

Bianca Stone, from What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems; “Other Wound”

[Text ID: “Every daughter / has a cage around her head / and a mother on the cross. / I always hope to take it off, and rarely do. / Instead, I climb up, like a child into the bed. / I nail myself beside you.”]

from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver (from “Upstream: Selected Essays”)

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.

fire with fire, 1986

The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1920–1923

Nikos Engonopoulos, from Bolívar, a Greek Poem

a beautiful edwardian set I found at the thrift store today..♡

— e.e.cummings

…your lips are / pomegranate

Aaliya Zaveri, ed. by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes, from Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women: A World Poetry Anthology; “Sunday morning, greenwich village, NYC”

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

[Text ID: “To come to you willingly— / even now I ask foe this ache.”]