Deena

“All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only
remember
and string them all
together
they would spell
the answer.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the fact, in the palm of your hand, dying.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“My Heart’s Own Blood,
I dance to you in a body built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense of what it loves. This letter will sting you when it’s done. Let it, and read a postscript in its death throes.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War