And There Were All Those Poems About Women, Written By Men: It Seemed To Be A Given That Men Wrote Poems

And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet.

Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, 1972. (via megairea)

“I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know. “I can’t get to know you” means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me. […] It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”

— Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse, “The Unknowable”

an array of supremely unsexy happenings

Maria, “Coming Home” in A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Rakesh Ratti

“This nightmare in New Zealand feels unfathomable. Except it isn’t. The hate that killed Muslims praying in Christchurch is the hate that killed Jews praying in Pittsburgh is the hate that killed African Americans praying in Charleston is the hate that killed Sikhs praying in Wisconsin. If we don’t face white supremacy it will destroy all of us. Please God, let all of us who know the pain of being targeted for who we are have patience with each others’ imperfections. So we can join together. And be safe together. And get free together.”

— Rabbi Mike Rothbaum

“can i see you again” is such a sweet thing to say