the River of forgetfulness

But grief compels me,

maybe even more than sleep.

I am waiting for something to last.

I know nothing will.

~Sanna Wanni

“i’m the beast 

rattling the cage,

asking for slaughter.”

~Franny Choi

“In cyclamen flowers the red of summer

combines with the blue of autumn into a

pinkish purple,

and their fragrance recaptures all the

sweetness of the past;

but as you inhale it for longer,

there is a quite different smell behind it :

that of decay and death.”

~Marlen Haushofer

“This nameless chassis in

                  in an unremembered alcove.

Like a penumbra this room has eaten me alive,

dismembered me.

It remembers my bones,

my aches,

my throe,

my wounds.

Sempiternal.

Undying a death that has crawled in formations

of demons since eons.

The day I die —

         relentlessly the thunder will roar

 with vertebrae of titanium.

This earth will lambaste, obliterate in its heat.

I have died many horrendous deaths;

Needless to say, the final one will damage..."

~ Cunning H.M

Photography: Maria Petrova

“And the night smells like snow.

Walking home for a moment you

almost believe you could start again.

And an intense love rushes to your heart,

                                and hope.

It’s unendurable, unendurable.”

— Franz Wright

[She] fuses with the living natural world…

Doves fly from the peaks of her breasts…

She is either feverishly alive or hopelessly dead. 

~Forugh Farrokhzad

Emily Dickinson by Roberto De Mitri  

(...a melancholy world, made of loneliness, made of endless empty spaces. 

Spaces that sometimes only the fog is able to fill.) 

I Must Go In, The Fog Is Rising

 Emily Dickinson

By the middle of the week,

I am tired of being a person.

So on Thursdays,

give me space to die a little in private.

I don’t want to go to the grocery store,

fold laundry, wash a pan,

or cut up artichokes for a salad.

Let me sit quietly in a room alone with my

knees

folded to one side.

I will retreat into myself,

where I have resided obscurely through

immeasurable and contrasting lives,

all disorganized and stacked on top of

each other in the pit of my stomach.

Sometimes,  they spill out of my mouth

like a sheet

of ice because of you and your nagging fingers

pulling at my bottom lip,

hungry for me to tell you what I think before

I know how to say it.

~ Madisen Kuhn 

It is a coin, a mirror, a plate, a pearl.

For the ancient Greeks, it was the goddess Selene.

For Emily Dickinson, it was “a Chin of Gold”;

for E.E. Cummings, “a fragment of angry candy”;

for Nazik Al-Malaika, a pool or an island or a basket of jasmine.

Borges suggested that, for Shakespeare, it was less the thing itself than the English word for it, that lingering syllable.

Apocryphally, it’s the image Li Bai tried to grasp as he fell drunk into a river and drowned.

Mina Loy’s “silver Lucifer / serves / cocaine in cornucopia” somewhere in its valleys, and Ariosto’s knight Astolfo finds there everything ever lost on Earth.

Beneath it, Issa’s snail crawls, Coleridge’s icicles quietly shine, and Margaret Wise Brown’s bunny says “Goodnight.”

It glides through the spells and verses of every language.

It obsessed Sylvia Plath, who said it was her mother.

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat danced by the light of it on their honeymoon—

and which anonymous poet coined that word?

Fifty years ago, humans flew up and stood on it.

Written by: AUSTIN ALLEN

Photography: Natalia Drepina