Maybe I should meet one who would know how to love me.
Simone de Beauvoir, tr. by Justin O’Brien, from “The Woman Destroyed,”
Etikett: poetry
Paul Celan, tr. by Patrick Cotter, from Selected Poems; “Crowned Out,” c. 1967
I walk around with this voice that wants me dead.
It usually clears its throat first thing in the morning,
as my dreams are lifting like patchy fog.— Brittani Sonnenberg, from “It’s Not That Bad,” published in Conflict of Interest
She bound jasmine blossoms in her hair.
Meena Alexander, from “Fault Lines,” originally published c. 1993
I feel torn to pieces by a rage of love.
Gustave Flaubert, from “Madame Bovary,” published c. October 1856
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”
— Bram Stoker, excerpt from Dracula
My imagination is dead, my genius lost, my energies sleep.
Mary Shelley, from a diary entry wr. c. January 1824 featured in “Journals,”
“My sin is that all my world is in him.”
— Alexandra Andreyevna, from a letter to M. P. Ivanova wr. c. October 1902
Poetry made visible what my body already knew.
Andrés Cerpa, from “Therefore,” published in Ploughshares
beberequin 