hexafu

“An “angel” is anything that carries out a mission for God. This includes forces of nature. […] Photosynthesis? That’s an angel. Gravity? An angel. Magnetism? Angel. The Midrash in Bereishis Rabbah (chapter 1) says than an angel only performs one job. That job doesn’t have to be destroying Sodom; it could be peristalsis, centripetal force or condensation.”

— Rabbi Jack Abramowitz, Angels

“Two hundred and ten million years of desire wash through me. Blood-eater. Suppose I let it escape as seed shoots through the eyes of a dreaming god—would it frighten him away?”

women like you / so like a vacuum ? / like / a stunningly beautiful menace to swallow you whole ? / so like a woman ?

— Shay Alexi, from “Today a Man on the Internet Said,” published in Tinderbox

“I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive.”

— Laurie Anderson explaining her attraction to Moby-Dick

“Life goes more smoothly without a heart,”

— Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: 1976 – 1986; “The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart,”

so let it be known when I want something I want more of it than usually exists.

— Savannah Brown, from Closer Baby Closer; “Seduction theory”

Now that he knows its value, he is deprived. The condition of possession is ignorance. Even on the physical plane: one really possesses only a stranger.

— Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1953-1951

— Anne Carson, The Anthropology of Water 

Your god comes and he is ordinary and terrible.

— Leila Chatti, Portrait of the IlIness as Nightmare

A not admitting of the wound

Until it grew so wide

That all my Life had entered it

And there were troughs beside –

A closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun

Until the tender Carpenter

Perpetual nail it down –

— Emily Dickinson, A not admitting of the wound (1188)

The first section of darkness is the densest, dear, after that, light trembles in –

— Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, written c. November 1883, from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

The swamps are pink with June.

— Emily Dickinson, from ’All these my banners be’ (Poem #22), Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“I remember nightfall and your room’s open door, the door through which neighbors and angels came in. And the clouds—november evening clouds, drifting in circles over the land. The little trees burdened with jasmine, with doves and droplets of water. That joyous pealing, endless chirping—every evening the same. And then the next morning, with its tiny dead angels strewn everywhere like paper birds, or the most exquisite of eggshells. Your dazzling death.”

— Marosa DiGiorgio