― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History Of My Brief Body

— Anna Akhmatova, The Guest

[text ID: "What do you want?" I asked. / "To be with you in hell," he said.]

Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz

Anna Akhmatova, tr. by Lenore Mayhew and William Mcnaughton, from Poem Without A Hero and Selected Poems; “In a dream”

Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait in Letters

and the bitterness in goodbye

Vladimir Nabokov, from Letters to Véra

when arctic monkeys sang “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust” and when the lumineers sang “damn your wife, I’d be your mistress just to have you around” and when hozier sang “if I was born as a blackthorn tree, I’d wanna be felled by you, held by you” and when son lux sang “if you need to, you can break me too, please just take me with you” and when of monsters and men sang “I’ll be the blood if you’ll be the bones, I’m giving you all” and

you tried being GENTLE,         you tried being KIND…

                                            & IN THE END—                                                 you found it made you                                                        even more cruel.

this was always going to happen.

matthew stover, david levithan, margarita karapanou, aeschylus, karese burrows, richard siken