Alice Smith

“Yes,” she said. “Truth is what survives verification. Different tongues may call it different names — honesty, fidelity, justice, love — but when you strip language away, what you have left is material behavior. Action. Roots. The rest is perfume and poetry.”
― mason carter

“It should weigh nothing.
Just wood and air,
a shape meant for sitting,
a space meant for filling.
But somehow, it carries more than I do.
This chair—
your chair—
still leans slightly to the left,
still remembers the way you sat,
one leg tucked under,
hands resting lightly on the arms,
as if you were always about to leave
but never quite did.”
― Mason Carter, Saltwater & Smoke: Poems of Almosts, Goodbyes, and What We Leave Behind

“I wake reaching for you,
fingers curling around nothing,
closing on air thick with absence.
You are not here, but my body does not believe it.
It still flinches at the shape of you,
at the memory of weight no longer there.
Somewhere beneath my skin,
you still exist.”
― Mason Carter, Saltwater & Smoke: Poems of Almosts, Goodbyes, and What We Leave Behind

“Mira nodded slowly, her cheek brushing his. “That takes us deeper, Jullian. Beneath the political structure lies something even more fundamental: the social relationship to the very materials of life. The food we eat. The soil we grow it in. The water we drink, the trees that breathe with us. Historically, these were held in common.”
― Mason Carter, Her Name is Anarchy: a novella