Jennifer Peña

“When you love a thing too much, it is a special kind of pain to show it to others and to see that it is lacking.”
― Nghi Vo, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

“Your departure crashes like a thunder, and the timbers of the house shake with the force of the space you left behind.”
― Nghi Vo, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

“I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.”
― Frank O'Hara

“As you go on with your life, always remember the things that are good in you. They're your gifts. As long as you have these things, you'll find happiness, and you'll make the people around you happy.”
― Genki Kawamura, 世界から猫が消えたなら [Sekai kara Neko ga Kietanara]