Antonia

“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 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

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Before he could speak and harm her with words while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabina he struck down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: "That was not me."
Any devastating words addressed to the Sabina he had possessed, the primitive one, could not reach her then; she was already halfway out of the forest of their desire, the core already far away, invulnerable, protected by flight. What remained was a costume: it was piled on the floor of his room, and empty of her.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love