Rae Leaver Rahman

“All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like . . . like black holes, maybe.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Small, hunched, dark-haired, he scuttled from the car. A beetle of a man.”
― Lucie McKnight Hardy, Water Shall Refuse Them

“Sonnet LXXXI

And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.”
― Pablo Neruda

“In New York I’d had a perennially sawdust-encrusted sculpture professor, who told my class, ‘You’ll know you’re a New Yorker when you have a dream where you discover another room in your apartment, through a closet, or behind a chest of drawers – if your subconscious is carving out legroom, you’re one of us.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes