“I sank in him like the sea, awfully.”— D. H. Lawrence, from Selected Poems; “A Woman and her Dead Husband,”
“I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb,”— Bram Stoker, from The Collected Prose Works; “Dracula,” wr. c. 1897
“I took the flowers from my hair with a withered hand.”— Nina Cassian, tr. by William Jay Smith, from “Bread and Wine,” c. 1973
“I live in sadness, desiring you.”— Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino, from “In Love and Praise of a Lady,”
“Her solitude is desertlike.”— Zbigniew Herbert, from “The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays,” c. 1999
“Sky of a witch, is it going to rain?”— Benjamin Péret, tr. by James Laughlin, from “Song in a Time of Drought,”
“Today my blood is spent.”— János Pilinszky, from The Desert of Love: Selected Poems; “Quatrain,”
“A wolf eats wolf.”— Vsevolod M. Garshin, from “The Signal,” originally published c. May 1877
“I’ll be screaming through the afterlife. I’ll be hunting for you, buried under flowers.”— Chelsea Wolfe, from Hisspun; “Two Spirit,” released c. September 2017
“No matter what happens, I will always choose to love you. I may be cold, distant and hopeless sometimes but when people ask me: what’s her name? I will always say yours. Because it’s you, my love. Always you.”— Juansen Dizon, Always
i only want the world
to end when i’m done
with it— sam sax, from “New God of an Antique War,” bury it
Why is it so hard to say “I love you” but so easy to say
“I am hungry” or “No, I can’t” even though those are
typically difficult for me to say.— Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, from The Easy Body
“You / think that without you, I’d be incomplete. Conqueror. Carrier- / arounder.”— Emily Jungmin Yoon, from “Don’t Touch Me,” A Cruelty Special to Our Species