the River of forgetfulness

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

This is the dysfunction talking.

This is the disease talking.

This is how much I miss you talking.

This is the deepest blue, talking, talking,

always talking to you.

~Maggie Nelson, Bluets

                        BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN 

While Thanksgiving is usually traced back to a 1621 meal between pilgrims and Native Americans, its origins as a national holiday are much more recent.

On Oct. 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving. He saw the occasion as a peaceful interlude amid the Civil War.

“she licks blood off her fingers and she looks like divine absolution.

                     careful, meleager;

this is your sport but she’s not playing a game.

do not think you are safe because you love her.

do not think she will not stain her mouth red with your blood too.”

— Maddie C.

Photography: Natalia Deprina 

I am dying as I sit.

I lose a dimension.

The silver track of time empties into the distance,

The white sky empties of its promise,

                                            like a cup.

This is a disease I carry home,

                                            this is a death.

Again, this is a death.

Is it the air,

The particles of destruction I suck up?

Am I a pulse

That wanes and wanes,

                                            facing the cold angel?

Is this my lover then?

This death, this death?

Is this the one sin then,

this old dead love of death?

~Sylvia Plath

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died:

when they reach old age,

if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought,

disease and innumerable attacks of pests,

fungi and plagues,

they succumb from overabundance.

When they come to the end of their life cycle,

they put out a final, massive crop of lemons.

In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away;

then their fruits ripen all at once,

whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said,

to see such exuberance before death.

~Benjamín Labatut 

Photography: Natalia Deprina 

take me to bed            tell me something about alienation that you haven’t already

 
            If I stare too hard at the world it all becomes an assembly line

 
Lover, I beg you         gift me a revolution—

~Yesenia Montilla

Photography: Laura Makabresku

~Joyce Mansour

Photography Natalia Deprina 

I am accused.

I dream of massacres.

I am a garden of black and red agonies.

                           I drink them,

Hating myself,

                           hating and fearing.

And now the world conceives

Its end and runs toward it,

                           arms held out in love.

~Sylvia Plath

Photography Natalia Deprina

~ Stanley Schell (1903).