such a forever is love’s any now

- e. e. cummings

yes is a pleasant country

- e. e. cummings

Contusion

Sylvia Plath

Color floods to the spot, dull purple.

The rest of the body is all washed-out,

The color of pearl.

In a pit of rock

The sea sucks obsessively,

One hollow the whole sea’s pivot.

The size of a fly,

The doom mark

Crawls down the wall.

The heart shuts,

The sea slides back,

The mirrors are sheeted.

Doron Langberg, Drawing Mark, 2020

Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The point is not that queerness is yet to arrive but that it is an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.

- Jose Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

That’s one of the things 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren't made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (1993)

I know it feels like your life is a line of dominoes that only knows how to fall, 

but I promise you, you are the hand that can pick them up and build a fortress.

- Andrea Gibson

And yet the look of that life stayed.

The specific movement of that love,

the pure and unashamed light.

- Constantine Cavafy

You are a beautiful thing. We are all beautiful things, 

turning the dark corners of the world into 

places where we can finally breathe.

- Richard Siken

I am a woman who loves women

and I am a person who loves the beautiful,

and we are rewriting the map of what is possible

with every single touch.

- June Jordan

We are the architecture of our own rescue.

We are the ones who can love ourselves

when no one else is looking

or willing.

- Essex Hemphill

You are not a mistake. You are too many exquisite things to fit into a word.

- Andrea Gibson

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

it is

a power

nourished by comfort

knowing

we are

doing each other's work

- audre lorde