Erica

“Try again, I've gotten much better at detecting your bullshit”
― Alexandra Bracken, In the Afterlight

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Hades

Where we go when he closes my eyes
and under what country;
some blue darkness, farther from hell;
a landscape of absense and root and stone.

There are no bodies here,
we dream shapeless dreams--
a constant, cloudless storm.

Mother, I'll never wake up from him.
I have already traveled too far.
My mouth is the color of his mouth
and his arms are no longer his arms;
they're mute as smoke, as my first white dress,
and the spear of his name, once ferocious,
dissolves on my tongue
like sugar, like birdsong, I whisper it:
Hades”
― Cecilia Woloch

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass