Antonia

“I met a man tonight. A high school English teacher
from the next town. A small town. Maybe

I shouldn’t have, but he had the hands
of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to.

The way they formed brief churches
over the table as he searched for the right words.

I met a man, not you. In his room the Bibles shook on the shelf
from candlelight. His scrotum a bruised fruit. I kissed it

lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade
before hurling it into the night’s mouth.

Maybe the tongue is also a key.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Simon, the mystery of him, and somehow as I looked out the taxi window I started to think about his physical presence in the city, that somewhere inside the city’s structure, standing or sitting, holding his arms one way or another, dressed or undressed, he was present, and Dublin was like an advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows, and the quality of the air was instilled, the temperature was instilled, with his presence, and with youre mail, and with this message I was writing back to you in my head even then. The world seemed capable of including these things, and my eyes were capable, my brain was capable, of receiving and understanding them. I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“What is older than desire?
the bare tree asked.
Sorrow, said the sky.
Sorrow is a river
older than desire.

— Robert Hass, from “February: Question” in “February Notebooks: The Rains,” Summer Snow: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)”
― Robert Hass, Summer Snow: New Poems

“I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.