Sandra Lim

“AMOR FATI Inside every world there is another world trying to get out, and there is something in you that would like to discount this world. The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts, and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one. You could claim professional fondness for the world around you; the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive, and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors. Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one— is this the great world, which is whatever is the case? The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning. Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life? Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some, and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.”
― Sandra Lim, The Wilderness: Poems

“SELVA ANTICA What dreams! Those forests! —SAMUEL BECKETT, ENDGAME It was a way to think in the unearthly openness of time. You stepped away from this world so that you could consider it from afar. Did the moon still appear cold and indifferent? Did a human sound seem singular? You only remember that there was nothing to eat in this wilderness, so that by the time spring came, in generation and decay, it was not abstract enough for you— In your want you conjured more blankness, a prodigious emptiness, the fair schoolroom of the sky. Paradise would be paper-white, a way to ease into this nothingness.”
― Sandra Lim, The Wilderness: Poems