You can dream he's yours

Somewhere, there’s a room where things go 
to lose their names. 

- Cameron Awkward-Rich
You have to understand that there are many 
rooms. Each of them operates by other laws. 
Here, once you name a thing, you can’t take it 
back. It has its own life now, one that moves 
along without concern for you. At first, you go 
around talking to the trees & for just a moment 
they turn to face you.

- Cameron Awkward-Rich
Yesterday down at the canal
Frank O'Hara

You say that everything is very simple and interesting
it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel does
i am terribly bored
sometimes it is like seeing a bad movie
other days, more often, it's like having an acute disease of the kidney
god knows it has nothing to do with the heart
nothing to do with people more interesting than myself
yak yak
that's an amusing thought
how can anyone be more amusing than oneself
how can anyone fail to be
can i borrow your forty-five
i only need one bullet preferably silver
if you can't be interesting at least you can be a legend
(but i hate all that crap)
Mechanics
Carl Phillips

   I remember almost nothing now
of who he was, or how I was,
around him. I can make that matter,
or I don’t have to, it doesn’t
   have to matter,
any more than the small
moth I watched struggling in
what appeared to be—torn and
otherwise empty—an abandoned
web: there was time, yet,
I might have freed it, but even
in abandonment, in what had
   been abandoned—the web,
maybe, but now the moth
for sure—I saw the ghost of purpose
still having a purpose—hard not
to respect that. It’s as if
the mind somewhere
   means to shut down memory,
that way preventing us from
understanding too clearly
our own unhappiness, and
in place of memory, offers up
   belief. We believe we’re happy.
Life doesn’t rhyme.
Life is poetry, not math.

- Andrea Gibson
Tadpole
Andrea Gibson

A tadpole doesn’t know
it’s gonna grow bigger.
It just swims,
and figures limbs
are for frogs.
People don’t know
the power they hold.
They just sing hymns,
and figure saving
is for god.
Forgive me for inviting you into the unsafety of language.
- Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe
we are a concerning type of forever
- jason b. crawford
Apocrypha
Rae Armantrout

Dead satellite speaks.

Person with unique
blood type discovered.

Rodents evolving in real time.

Ways humans can escape
the earth.

___

Joints grind like
shot brakes.

Food ignites
in our stomachs.

But we’re still muffin-bunnies,
muddle-buckets,

cuddle-chunks.
Then Again
Rae Armantrout

I prefer what’s centripetal
or recursive,

what bends inward
like a shell’s ridges

because meaning is half
déjà vu.
___

Then again
I like what’s loose,

far-flung, and dubious

like rumor
or cottonwood chaff

because meaning is promiscuous.
It is a joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found.
- Donald Winnicott
Each of us at each other’s backs
whispering over and over and over,

Live. Live. Live.

- Andrea Gibson
Pick me up in a truck with that bumper sticker that says,
“It is no measure of good health
to be well adjusted to a sick society.”

- Andrea Gibson
You are not alone

in wondering who will be convicted of the crime
of insisting you keep loading your grief
into the chamber of your shame.

You are not weak

just because your heart feels so heavy.

- Andrea Gibson
Some of us know Love

is not the only closet
we will be told never to come out of.
There is also the closet of Grief.
The closet of Sorrow.
The closet of Panic.

- Andrea Gibson
My panic is not a lifeguard,
but you can’t tell my panic that.
My panic googled, “How to perform CPR on yourself.”

- Andrea Gibson
busy with alone
- danez smith
A atomização e a narcisização crescente da sociedade nos ensurdece perante a voz do outro. Levam igualmente à perda da empatia. Hoje, cada um presta homenagem ao culto de si mesmo. Cada um performa e se produz. Não é a personalização algorítmica da rede, mas o desaparecimento do outro, a incapacidade de ouvir atentamente, que é responsável pela crise da democracia.

- Byung-Chul Han, Infocracia: digitalização e a crise da democracia (2022)
As coisas não são todas tão compreensíveis e dizíveis quanto geralmente nos fazem crer.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Tell all the truth but tell it slant.
- Emily Dickinson
Hedgehog
Paul Muldoon

The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret

With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.

We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.

The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.
When I sleep I am hungry.
I dream I am eating light.

- James Tate
Sailor’s Song 
Jen Bartman

I am rowing my teacup 
in space. 

Still, sadness 
makes me tired. 

There’s nothing to do 
out here but wait 

until another frightening carnation 
blooms 

in the field
of frightening carnations. 
Inside the dark estrangement
sheltering me from people not

unlike me
I can only hope I do what matters

make my mother proud

- Kevin Simmonds
My Wifi can take me out of here
anytime    so can my credit score

- Kevin Simmonds
The lessons are getting harder.
- Cintia Santana
One must be drenched in words.
Life is too scattered for me to savor it any more.

- Bill Yarrow
N’ayons pas peur d’etre heureux,
c’est juste un bon moment a passer

- Romain Gary
Playing Army
Donovan McAbee

I died better than anybody.
My older brother said so.
He shot me from around
the corner of the house,
Pow-Pow-Pow, in quick succession.
As my body arched,
floating back towards the earth,
my rifle rolling up through the air,
all their mouths stood agape
to witness such fluid grace.
I was so damn good
every kid on the block
wanted to shoot me.

Cape Fear, S01E04

Gente, é óbvio que eu não estou falando de quem precisa seriamente [de medicação psiquiátrica], porque tem gente que precisa. Então apaga isso da mente.
- Viviane Mosé, Sem Censura (04/06/2026)

Tá bem, vou apagar.
Shame is the most powerful force in the universe. It can make a man deny his own eyes, his own heart, his own skin.

- Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
Gay life is a series of reinventions. We leave our families of origin to find our families of choice, and in doing so, we have to invent the very language of our relationships.

- Edmund White, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)
We were the first generation to define ourselves by our sexuality and the first to be destroyed by it.
- Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (1997)
If you are a monster, you are at least unique; if you are like everyone else, you are a cliché.
- Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
I envy people who can remember the order in which things happened in their lives. I can't. For me the past is a solid wall of portraits, all looking at me simultaneously.

- Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story (1982)
A liberdade individual do sujeito existe na brecha do processo de freios e contrapesos entre os poderes [do Estado]. É isso que cria o Estado de Direito. O Estado de Direito não é criado por um poder acima dos outros e que se acha absoluto.

- Luiz Felipe Pondé, Linhas Cruzadas (18/06/2026)
Por que motivo a longevidade é mais importante do que o prazer?
- João Pereira Coutinho, Linhas Cruzadas (18/06/2026)
A gente é uma espécie assustada, acuada.
- Luiz Felipe Ponde, Linhas Cruzadas (18/06/2026)
Ah, as palavras, se não houvesse o risco, 
eu diria todas

- Darcy França Denófrio
O espelho esperando o reflexo da face humana, sempre tão incerta da sua imagem.
- Julia Hartwig
Pois não buscamos o que é perfeito, buscamos o que resta da incessante procura.
- Czesław Miłosz
Aprendemos tanto, você sabe, tanto.
Como aos poucos o que não se poderia tirar de nós
É tirado, pessoas, arredores.
E o coração não falece quando se pensa que deveria

- Czesław Miłosz
Onde quer que esteja, em qualquer lugar
na Terra, escondo dos outros a certeza de
que n ã o s o u d a q u i.
Como se tivesse sido enviado para absorver
o máximo das cores, sons, cheiros, sabores,
provar de tudo o que é
reservado ao Homem, converter o vivido
num registo mágico e levá-lo para lá, de onde
parti.

- Czesław Miłosz
Ele próprio só sabia cerrar os dentes, aguentar e
esperar que a velhice inviabilizasse os dramas

- Czesław Miłosz
Toda parte era parte alguma e parte alguma, toda parte.
-  Czesław Miłosz
If we run fast enough
the winds will not catch us.

- Beth Rollins
Sendo eu mais doméstica do
que intelectual,
Não escrevo jamais de forma
consciente e raciocinada, e sim
impelida por um impulso incontrolável.
Sendo assim, tenho a
consciência de ser autêntica.

- Cora Coralina
amasso o silencio
- conceição evaristo
How language constantly revises the mind.
- Maggie Smith
Now that I have no other mind
to which I might apply my own,
I polish it to near-shining.
Thoughts come away
cleaner and cleaner.
If I lean in close enough,
I can see my reflection.

- Maggie Smith
Oh self
- Maggie Smith
I’ve always thought of who I am
as being concentrated in my head & chest,

as if there’s a waterline at my rib cage
& contrary to their density, thoughts

& feelings stay afloat.

- Maggie Smith
— O ouro? 
— Eu o detesto como vocês detestam Deus. 

- Charles Baudelaire
Dá mil beijos, depois outros cem, dá
muitos mil, depois outros sem fim

- Catulo
I don’t think we need to know what we’re afraid of, 
but if you’re afraid of something, feel it

- Bryce Emley
Diferentemente do poder, o respeito não é necessariamente uma relação assimétrica. Sente-se, de fato, frequentemente respeito por pessoas exemplares ou por superiores, mas o respeito recíproco, que se baseia em uma relação simétrica de reconhecimento, é fundamentalmente possível.

- Byung-Chul Han, No enxame: perspectivas do digital (2013)
há
lugares em que
você sabe que
não vai ser
feliz mas
vai

- gregorio duvivier
Quem é este que me olha do outro lado?
- Machado de Assis
Em que espelho ficou perdida
a minha face?

- Cecília Meireles
Lo único que ha cambiado es el espejo

Não adianta pegar uma pessoa famosa na internet e fazer um filme, porque não rola. Ela é famosa ali, naquele... É como um cisne, famoso cisne da Grace Kelly: um cisne fora da lagoa é um pato desengonçado, né? Então ele tem que ficar ali.
- Miguel Falabella, Roda Viva (15/06/2026)


Em terra firme, onde caminham as pessoas comuns, o cisne é desajeitado, até ridículo. Quando sobe a margem rebolando, parece dolorosamente com outro tipo de ave, não é mesmo?
- Príncipe Albert, O Cisne (1956)
Let me glide noiselessly;
With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O soul.

Tenderly—be not impatient
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love).

- Walt Whitman
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing
- Walt Whitman
But O heart! heart! heart!
- Walt Whitman
Nas altas torres do corpo,
quis ficar. Amanhecia.
Todos os pombos voavam
das altas torres do corpo.

- Carlos Nejar
He was looking at a beauty that was entirely self-contained, 
a beauty that required no justification outside of its own existence.

- Yukio Mishima
They say orphans make the best lovers.
Because they have no names to save
or lose. They just have the dark
and the open hands.

- Ocean Vuong
The map of your body is a map of my own home, a country 
I have memorized by heart, where every hill 
and valley is familiar and beloved.

- Maggie Nelson
We are not going to be invisible anymore. 
We are going to be here,
and we are going to be loud,
and we are going to be loved.

- Essex Hemphill
I didn't look like a woman anymore, but I didn't feel like a man either. 
I felt like a traveler who had crossed a border into a country 
where no one spoke my language.

- Leslie Feinberg 

I speak here as a black lesbian feminist, lesbian because I love women, 
feminist because I am part of a movement to change the status of women, 
and black because that is my history.

- Audre Lorde
And the Glass Slider was moving through the dark,
and I was thinking of you,
and how the world is a different shape
because we are both in it.

- Frank O'Hara
I want to cry my grief and tell you why,
so that you will love me and weep for me 
in a night of nightingales and daggers.

- Federico García Lorca
She was a person who could only be loved by those who were themselves complex
- Virginia Woolf
The affection of a mature intellect for a budding mind
it is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. 
It dictates and pervades great works of art...

- Oscar Wilde
To be with you this morning is a holy thing
beyond the power of a church to give, or a priest to tell.

- Emily Dickinson
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, 
North and South excursions making.

- Walt Whitman
That you are a woman is no obstacle
to my loving you; for the soul lacks gender,
and the physical is far from the spirit.

- Juana Inés de la Cruz
I am more dear to myself than I am used to be;
more than my usual self, my heart I nourish,
since you have held its core within your hand.

O loveliest boy that ever ran
Upon the earth since time began!
The sun, the full moon, and the stars
Are all your bright familiars...

- Abu Nuwas
someone will remember us
even in another time

- Sappho
El ojo que ves no es
ojo porque tú lo veas;
es ojo porque te ve.

- Antonio Machado
even I who have no lover
I love this time
of new kimonos

- Ontsura
no wind, yet the windbells
keep on ringing

- shiren
now I return to the burning house
but where is the place I used to live?

- Kan-ami
the world so unsure, unknowable
the world so unsure, unknowable
who knows—our griefs may
hold our greatest hopes.

- zeami motokiyo
Town of Uneven Love (But All Love Is Uneven)
Anne Carson

If he had loved me he would have seen me.
At an upstairs window brow beating against the glass.
Town of the Noon Stack
Anne Carson

Midi.
Midi.
Midi.
Midi.
Midi.
It is very expensive he thought.
To come back.

- Anne Carson
Just drop sin and go.
- Anne Carson
On Hedonism
Anne Carson

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just
want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to
wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a
heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as
round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what
falls.
Dois homens e uma teoria
AR

Quando me viram em uma relação amorosa com certa diferença de idade, algumas pessoas sentiram necessidade de me explicar a assimetria. Achei curioso. Não porque a assimetria não existisse, mas porque pareciam supor que ela lhes era visível e a nós, não.

Como se a diferença de idade, de experiência, de história ou de posição fosse algo que apenas um observador pudesse perceber. Ou pior, como se existisse um culpado na relação. Ou dois?

Mas nunca acreditei que o problema ético de uma relação pudesse ser resolvido pela simples identificação de uma diferença. As diferenças existem. Entre amantes, amigos, pais e filhos, professores e alunos, entre qualquer duas pessoas que se encontrem no mundo. Há assimetrias de idade, de desejo, de recursos, de conhecimento, de linguagem, de temperamento. Não conheço relação humana que não seja atravessada por alguma forma de desigualdade.

O que me interessa não é apenas a existência da assimetria e o que fazemos com ela: é ser julgado sem saber se temos consciência dela.

Nós sabemos. E nos perguntamos: Pode ser questionada? Pode ser renegociada? Há espaço para dizer não? Há espaço para mudar de ideia? Há respeito pela autonomia de cada um?

Uma relação não se torna ética porque é perfeitamente simétrica. Tampouco se torna abusiva apenas porque contém uma diferença visível. Há relações aparentemente equilibradas que são feitas de manipulação e silêncio. E há relações atravessadas por diferenças importantes que são sustentadas por diálogo, consciência, cuidado e consentimento.

Talvez por isso eu tenha desconfiado quando tentaram resumir uma relação concreta a uma única palavra. As palavras são necessárias. Os conceitos também. Mas às vezes eles chegam antes da escuta. E quando isso acontece, deixam de ser instrumentos de compreensão e passam a funcionar como sentenças.

A assimetria existe. Sempre existirá. A questão nunca foi essa. A questão é como duas pessoas a atravessam juntas.
On Major and Minor
Anne Carson

Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions,
inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor
things include dirt, the names of schools of philosophy, mood
and not having a mood, the correct time. There are more major
things than minor things overall, yet there are more minor
things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list
them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to
be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from
your life itself, like some Elektra
                                                 Troubled.

… always the hard word box they wanted,

- Anne Carson, “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings”, in Plainwater (1995)
                                             He is troubled by words.

… in public words formed a clump in him.

- Anne Carson, “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings”, in Plainwater (1995)
Betwixt Thee and Me Let There Be Truth

                             Despite his professed cult of youth and pleasure, he knows moral worry.

At the border crossing all I could hear was your pulse
   and the wind combing along my earbone
     like antimatter

- Anne Carson, “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings”, in Plainwater (1995)
The Thing Is
Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.


Tip Toe, S01E02

Trooper, she didn’t just walk into the room,
she brought the whole sky with her.
And when she laughed, I swear to you,
my heart did a backflip into a pool of golden retriever puppies.

- Andrea Gibson
we are going to be so happy
the birds will look at us and say
damn look at them
they are doing it right
they are doing it with all their feathers

- CAConrad
I want to kiss you in the middle of the supermarket
- Chen Chen
Do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you, as the sun
reaches out, as it warms you?

- Mary Oliver
The rivers are frozen ropes pulling the island down.
- Natalie Diaz
We are the millions who do not count,
the numbers missing from the charts.
We love in the shadow of your laws,
outlaws of the heart,
counting our dead by the thousands.

- Essex Hemphill
Leo, you're queer in 2026. You're a political act.
- Melba in Tip Toe, S01E01
MELBA
I live in hope.

LEO
Don't, Melba.

Tip Toe, S01E01
Roux
Lucas Jacob

From the French,
and so r-o-u-x, not
an Old English name
for misgiving, though
it would be nice
to be able to roux
the day,
smoothing it out
as it darkens.
now         the wordless apples
- jenny grassl
JOÃO VICENTE
Eu lembro que, quando eu escrevia poesia pequeno, eu era muito dramático.
"Ai, como é triste ser triste", sabe?

GREGORIO DUVIVIER
Uma melancolia estética.

Não Importa, 11/06/2026
GREGORIO DUVIVIER
[Eu] 'tava [com] uma mente muito fragilizada, claramente, ali. Eu caí na poesia.

JOÃO VICENTE
Você caiu na poesia? Graças a Deus. 

GREGORIO DUVIVIER
Que é uma forma também de abraçar os derrotados.

JOÃO VICENTE
É uma forma de você sofrer com alguém sem ninguém.

Não Importa, 11/06/2026
gustavo keno eu não te conhecia
wanessa wolf eu te amo
Under the evening moon
the snail
      is stripped to the waist.

- Kobayashi Issa
All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
    killing mosquitoes.

- Kobayashi Issa
Marcia Riederer/ Ocean Photographer of the Year

LA Express Carwash 
Ross John Farrar

I’ve been losing so much lately. The designer sun glasses, only had them
a week. I lost the keys to my office, then a library book, The Dictionary of
American Slang. A page dog-eared at “Garbo: Half an English muffin.” So,
I bought ginkgo biloba & tried to stop drinking.

I’ve almost given up caring about what I have, since it’s just going
to be me until I’m no longer. Someone said we only lose things we don’t
care about, but I’ve lost hair & skin cells & so many perfect days.

We were saying goodbye. You were soon to drop me off for good, but first
we had to visit the car wash. Mercy, I thought.

Men in green & white jumpers motioned us in, the wheels catching track,
which made us feel like floating, so we floated through like a submarine.
A machine came down like the leafless organs of climbing plants, giant
soapy tendrils licked the glass.

All I wanted was for the car to stop, for us to sit there in the dark, watching
bubbles on the windshield grow & pop. We bobbed forward, still trapped,
while water evaporated all around us.
Please, let me keep this.
I’ve been trying to tell you that what I have
now is what I lost

- Sarah Bates
Aniline Dye 
Albe Harlow

who
knew
the violence

   not only
picked

the heads
but counted them
       counted them

as they colored
  magenta
my garden
dearest madonna
by AR

movement does not replace language 
movement 
is what language does we

are never out of language we may
be out of words but never 
out of meaning there 

are languages that do not know
they are languages 
too
 
silence

is a language
shutting itself

to listen
to you
only love can be so bizarre
女夫鹿や
毛に毛が揃うて
毛むつかし

meotojika ya
ke ni ke ga soroute
ke mutsukashi

A pair of deer rub-
bing hair against each other's
hard so hard to please

Dois cervos amantes—
pelo contra pelo, alinhados.
Tão difíceis.

- Bashō
You ask the sky 
               to lean in. 

- Cory Hutchinson-Reuss
as life itself grew ever more fictitious,
perpendicular to time

- maggie millner
Chamando de pensamento o que renova o pensamento
- Henri Meschonnic
life is under construction the scaffolding
does not complete the forgotten
moments so tiny
as the bits of air that
make up the sky we don’t see them
one by one since we are
inside
it’s when we block the sky with
our hand
that we age
all of a sudden

- henri meschonnic
I am a whirlwind
of meaning
I unravel
in what words
can no longer say

- Henri Meschonnic
Meschonnic / Saussure
por AR

a linguagem não diz o mundo
ela o faz passar
no corpo do discurso em curso
onde o sujeito se perde
e continua
all of life
 is a waiting room 
the sky is blue I am blue
 it’s raining I’m raining 
I drive silence into my words 

- Henri Meschonnic
Is abstraction still luxury
in a world in which—imagine—you don’t
feel watched? In the way that moral preferences are
aesthetic judgments, or how metaphor has gone out
of style.

- Cindy Juyoung Ok
To carry words or let words be carried away. A giving up—but also: a giving.
- Chris Campanioni
How to tell time from the body. I mean the difference between time and the body, the
body and time.

- Chris Campanioni
oh god as in / there is no turning back 

oh god as in / I had no choice 

oh god as in / this was going to happen anyway 

- Emily Zogbi
The placeholder word for all the things we cannot name is God.
- Anne Champion
It’s one thing to have words.
And then there’s meaning.

- Anne Champion
It is possible to live a whole life
with a pain lodged in the throat
without the language
to cough it out.

- Anne Champion
and I knew so certainly
there were unevolved things in me
that I haven’t found the sound
or typography for

- Anne Champion
Death of a Sasquatch 

Attention must be paid, said his wife,
 writing to the scientists. 

It’s possible to die from lack of recognition, 
she went on, convinced, 

        but day after day 
he sat lumpish on the lip of the crater 

until he went down to the basement 
of his mind, where he did not exist.
I am

               looking

for a sign.   

- Jess Turner
Lucidez
por AR

Investigo para saber até onde posso saber.
Heisenberg. Achar novas formas de ignorância.
Nietzsche. Arte para não perecermos.
Stevens. O real habitado.

Ciência. Correlatos neurais da atração.

Platão não sai da linguagem.
Derrida. Wittgenstein. Heidegger.

A filosofia não supera a poesia.
Ela é poesia. A religião é poesia.

imagens / imagems / inmagens
Ricoeur. O símbolo.
Borges. Beckett. Kafka.

Enquanto houver linguagem, não haverá posse do absoluto.
Absoluto? Ao nomear, simplifico:
Logo, há perda.

Investigo para saber até onde posso saber.
Ainda que atravessado pelo amor, 
pelo sofrimento, pela beleza
e pelo orgasmo.
My mouth, a moth.
Your mouth, lit til noon. Moon on the sheets. 
Spill. Lull. Lips. So much symmetry in hands. 
When they touch: a reflection one may hold.
When you’re gone I feel like a lonely tylenol.

- Stephanie Lane Sutton
Querido diário,

Já não me escapava que sou medíocre.
Fui revisar os fatos: eles concordaram.
O estranho foi ter amado
gente tão improvável.

- AR
Make too me acceptable at the end of time
- John Berryman
Surprise me on some ordinary day
with a blessing gratuitous. 

- John Berryman
As if only perfected by neon now only.
This moment. This otherwise.
Into which woundedly

mirrors decline now. This otherwise.
Into which darkfall
yet flowers yet

flowers forever.

- Andrew Maxwell
Already that

distance in which you will
no longer will
yet will

therefore remain. 

- Andrew Maxwell
One breathless word therein. Is therein. Is nothing.
- Andrew Maxwell
when the last speaker of a language dies,
a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light

- arthur sze
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.   
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,   
we ourselves flash and yearn

- John Berryman
Não há como determinar objetivamente o que é votar melhor. Porque a pessoa considera que votar melhor é votar igual a ela. Você pode imaginar no mundo ideal de Platão — mas, na realidade, não há parâmetro objetivo para dizer se você votou melhor.

- Luiz Felipe Pondé em Linhas Cruzadas, 11/06/2026
Se alguém ainda acha que existe o mocinho e o bandido na política brasileira, 
tá precisando crescer, né?

- Luiz Felipe Pondé em Linhas Cruzadas, 11/06/2026
It can be hard to wake in the middle of someone
else’s leaving. Impossible even to carry that burden.

- Jason B. Crawford
until language completes itself as cyclical silence
- andrew mossin
Blessed are we the ephemeral who can contemplate movement as an image of eternity and follow intently the parabola of the arrow until it is buried beneath the line of the horizon.

- José Lezama Lima
A poem: an aviary without cages.
- Gustaf Sobin
The muses don't descend: they're omnipresent.
He spoke
I listened.
I spoke,
he listened.
In between
we both
heard almost
nothing. 

- robert lax
sometimes i’ve tried to see more than i saw
- robert lax
to be “enlightened” is not to shine; nor to bring multitudes to the hill
where one sits cross-legged, to listen.

it is rather to know what one is doing (& even, perhaps, to enjoy it).

- robert lax
one
moment
passes

another
comes on

how
was
was

how
is
is

how
will
be
will
be

was
wasn't

is
isn't

will be
won't

- robert lax
when i play house
i don’t play
either the poppa
or the mama

it’s more
as though i was playing
i was
the house

- robert lax
“are you a visitor?” asked
the dog.

“yes,” i answered.
“only a visitor?” asked
the dog.

“yes,” i answered.

“take me with you,” said
the dog.

- robert lax
A problem in design
Robert Lax
 
what if
you like
to draw
big flowers,

but what
if some
sage has
told you
that
there is
nothing
more
beautiful

nothing
more
beautiful

than a
straight
line
?

what should
you draw:
big flowers?
straight lines?

i think
you should
draw

big flowers
big flowers

big flowers
big flowers

big flowers
big flowers

big flowers
big flowers

until
they become
a straight
line.
Beware
by AR

whale whale whale whale whale
 whale whale whale whale
  whale whale whale
   whale whale
     bewhale
   whale whale
  whale whale whale
 whale whale whale whale
whale whale whale whale whale
 whale whale whale whale
  whale whale whale
   whale whale
     bewhale
   whale whale
  whale whale whale
 whale whale whale whale
whale whale whale whale whale
I wait for the word that has already left.
- Jean Daive
The fact of love is always a lack.
- Anne Carson
What remains is what has disappeared.
- Gustaf Sobin
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stand still.

- T. S. Eliot
— Como vencer o vazio?
— Não o alimente com respostas

- AR
— Onde termina o corpo?
— Mostre-me a borda da sua saudade

- AR
on my 40th birthday i wake suddenly
- don judson
this deep
in/ there is only
Listen      there is only

Wait

- Don Judson
The line is the point 
going for a walk.

- Esther Kamkar
It felt 
important yesterday
to be alive now.

- D.S. Waldman
Amor é o que se aprende no limite
- Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Daqui por diante
é girar, girovagar, a combater
o erro, o falso, o mal de mil semblantes

- Carlos Drummond de Andrade
o eco
já não correspondendo ao apelo

- carlos drummond de andrade
O amor é o espaço e o tempo medidos pelo coração. Às vezes, basta um olhar, um contorno de ombros na penumbra, para que toda a nossa arquitetura interior desabe e se reconstrua em torno de outra pessoa.

- Marcel Proust em Em Busca do Tempo Perdido

It is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to see the difference. The difference is that a plain resource in not entangled with thickness and it does not mean that thickness shows such cutting, it does mean that a meadow is useful and a cow absurd. It does not mean that there are tears, it does not mean that exudation is cumbersome, it means no more than a memory, a choice and a reestablishment, it means more than any escape from a surrounding extra. 

- Gertrude Stein

Arquivo
Carlos Drummond de Andrade

O arquivo supre a falta de memória,
lembrando o que desejávamos esquecer.
Eu gosto de olhar as pedras
que nunca saem dali.
Não desejam nem almejam
ser jamais o que não são.
O ser das pedras que vejo
é só ser, completamente.
Eu quero ser como as pedras
que nunca saem dali.
Mesmo que a pedra não voe,
quem saberá de seus sonhos?
Os sonhos não são desejos,
os sonhos sabem ser sonhos.
Eu quero ser como as pedras
e nunca sair daqui.
Sempre estar, completamente,
onde estiver o meu ser.

- Caio Fernando Abreu
busy signals
- robert manaster
it happened for real
it happened (stop it!)
I was able to sit and cry on the sidewalk while the rest of the vacation continued,
but I was still able to smell things
I could still eat

- Anna Matysiak
But you are there, and I am here,
and the world is full of people who are not you.
It is so simple to be alive when you love someone,
to watch the buildings lean against the sky
and know that your hand in mine
is the only real architecture of the city.

- Frank O'Hara
Escrevo para você que não me lê.
Escrevo para sustentar o fôlego,
esse vício de prender a tarde entre os dentes.
Se te encosto, não há trégua nem segredo,
apenas o desenho nítido de duas mulheres
se inventando na moldura fria do quarto.

- Ana Cristina Cesar
I speak here as a woman of color who loves women
and who has found her own voice inside that love.
We were never meant to survive
not as we were, not as we are,
but we can choose to touch each other
until the borders of our bodies melt
and our names become a song against the dark.

- Audre Lorde
Por que a noite é este deserto onde se procura a própria voz?
Por que este amor que não cabe nas palavras,
nem nos corpos, nem na própria vida?
Quero te dizer o avesso de tudo,
a carne exposta, o avesso do silêncio,
enquanto o mundo gira do lado de fora,
estranho e longe de nós dois.

- Caio Fernando Abreu
no volume máximo

O amor é um discurso.
- Roland Barthes
O signo é uma ferida.
- Roland Barthes
The author is a modern figure.
- Roland Barthes
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language.
- Roland Barthes
Language is a skin.
- Roland Barthes
Orgasmos, os múltiplos.
Ódios, os mútuos.

- Bertolt Brecht
Domicílios, os temporários.
Adeuses, os bem sumários.

- Bertolt Brecht
Vidas, as espontâneas.
Mortes, as instantâneas.

- Bertolt Brecht
Palavra inocente é tolice. Uma testa sem rugas 
Indica insensibilidade. Aquele que ri 
Apenas não recebeu ainda
A terrível notícia.
Que tempos são esses, em que
Falar de árvores é quase um crime
Pois implica silenciar sobre tantas barbaridades?

- Bertolt Brecht
there is a language we speak
only when the world is looking away,
a vocabulary of ankles and wrists,
where a glance is a sentence
and a touch is the whole history of compliance
undone

- mary jean chan
gosto do seu corpo que não pede licença
bicho que sabe onde dói a fome
e morde direto no osso
te amar é esse susto de chão que falta
e a pressa de quem não tem amanhã garantido

- bruna mitrano
You are the weather. You are the cold water.
You are the thing that I am standing in,
soaking through.
We want to be clean, but we want it to be messy,
we want the hand on the throat to mean I love you.

- Richard Siken
the body is a theater
where the quietest parts of us
wait for the lights to go down
so we can finally touch the things
we were told to outgrow

- CAConrad
i am not a myth. i am a man
who wants to live to see his hair turn the color
of a winter sky, who wants to press his mouth
against another mouth & not feel like a country
going to war.

- danez smith
cuido de mim pra te amar sem urgências
pro amor não ser a balsa de escape do naufrágio
mas o cais onde ancorar a fúria mansa
das nossas águas profundas

- tatiana nascimento
Não se preocupe, meu amor.
O corpo deles é apenas a carne
pela qual começamos a nos lembrar
de como somos belos.

- Ocean Vuong
a cegueira do homem que de seu corpo morno
soletra o corpo morno d'outro homem
os sinais as vírgulas
discursa entre duas bocas e recita, extático e nu,
a abrasada violenta poesia que o corpo maquina na carne

- matheus guménin barreto
Nós,
que queríamos preparar o terreno para a gentileza,
não conseguimos ser gentis.

- Bertolt Brecht
Por que não dizemos as coisas importantes?
Seria tão fácil.

- Bertolt Brecht
por AR

Havia uma brecha deliberada em Brecht:
não era todo ele Bertolt.

Se ele assinasse Elisabeth Hauptmann,
Margarete Steffin ou Ruth Berlau
seria o mesmo.

Vamos seguindo pela mesma estrada,
Em busca das paragens da ilusão

- Auta de Souza
Ai daquele que deseja
Viver sem uma ilusão!

- Auta de Souza
It is better to say, “I am suffering,” 
than to say, “This landscape is ugly.” 

- Simone Weil
Your silence will not protect you.
- Audre Lorde
Love him and let him love you.
- James Baldwin
Diary of Flora Baum, January 23, 2005 - Ianualia
Julia Budenz

She is not lost beneath the cold white depths
Or blown aloft the cold white gusts.
Who is she? Through what weathers does she wander?

Bonus Track, 2023
George, c'est moi!
Day after day, time continues its unusual creation here.
I have, however, cleared my language. 

- Yang Biwei
estática poeira
- astrid cabral
No silêncio não há silêncio. 
- Astrid Cabral
M.I.A.-esque.
 
o rock doido da madonna
A more efficient form of desire, 
the illusion need only be re-applied every hour.

- Anthony Borruso
There's no door to the car of your body,
and nothing is as it is. 

- Greg Grummer
Um dia poderás chegar, tu que nunca chegas
porque não és um tu
ou porque chegas sempre em não chegares.

- António Ramos Rosa
E pensando se o amor
Vai além de
Nomes
Números
E essa longa espera
Insone

- Annita Costa Malufe
um amontoado de pele e peso
arrastando-se por um espaço exíguo
onde ninguém mais me vê 

- Annita Costa Malufe
Vasculho papéis que perderam sua função
Fotos documentos recortes

- Annita Costa Malufe
My nerves are tumed on. I hear them like
musical ínstruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing.

- Anne Sexton
We are of little faith.
We talk too much.

- Anne Sexton
the night I lean toward,
the night I want

- Anne Sexton
no volume máximo
 
Mas vocês bem sabem que o objetivo maior da filologia
é reduzir todo prazer textual
a um acidente histórico.

Fala curta sobre Van Gogh
Anne Carson

Eu bebo para entender o céu amarelo 
o enorme céu amarelo, dizia Van Gogh. 
Quando olhava o mundo enxergava os pregos 
que prendem as cores às coisas 
e via a dor dos pregos.
A body can be all
of your experiences
so loud 
      at once

- Shelby Pinkham
Memory is the first body
we learn to lose.

- Mollie O'Leary
I learned no one knows the difference
between closeness or ephemera. I only pass as not passing.

- Jzl Jmz
I want to be the stoic 
mountains living between granular opacity.

- Jzl Jmz 
i am medicated so deeply
              it doesn’t hurt to look
at the universe’s Underbelly

- Umang Kalra
‘I am going to kill God!’ said the little boy. 
‘If you don’t I will!’ shouted the little girl.
‘Don’t miss,’ said the little dog. ‘You don’t want to find out what happens next.’

I know it is terrible
to want nothing.

- Willie Lin 
so dark                     every firefly

              a sun                                         hung on wings

everything one                            shade of night

- josé felipe ozuna
Este desejo de sentido.
- Anelito de Oliveira
Sempre à procura de
algo que pensa ter
esquecido ali.

- Anelito de Oliveira
Há desilusão
mas não há
fuga

- Ana Martins Marques
From, S04E07


Fingindo que sou fingida

Pergunto aqui meus senhores
quem é a loura donzela
que se chama Ana Cristina

E que se diz ser alguém
É um fenômeno mor
Ou é um lapso sutil?

- Ana Cristina Cesar
risinho modernista
arranhando na garganta,
malandra, bicha,
bem viada, vândala,
talvez maquiavélica

- ana cristina cesar
abraçar com as retinas
cada pedacinho de matéria viva

- ana cristina cesar
Não posso desamar as utopias
- Álvares de Azevedo
Parece-me que vou perdendo o gosto,
Vou ficando blasé, passeio os dias
Pelo meu corredor, sem companheiro

- Álvares de Azevedo
E a alma, que faz neste feroz deserto?
- Alphonsus de Guimaraens Filho
Tudo é longe demais
- Alphonsus de Guimaraens Filho
O intocado te espera. E amanhece. E te iluminas
como se trincasses com os dentes a polpa do absoluto.

- Alphonsus de Guimaraens Filho
In the midst of writing there is merriment.
- Gertrude Stein
Queer idealism may be the only way to usher in a new mode of radicalism that can perhaps release queer politics from its current death grip.

- Jose Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, 2009
Fred Herko
by AR

One small jeté—
a dancer teaches the clouds
how to drift and fly.
Queerness, as I am describing it here, is more than just sexuality. It is this great refusal of a performance principle that allows the human to feel and know not only our work and our pleasure but also our selves and others.

- Jose Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, 2009
come on, meet me on the dance floor
The music goes on
The music goes on
The music goes on
The music goes on

I am on the same page as Bollen when he considers the dance floor as space where relations between memory and content, self and other, become inextricably intertwined.

- Jose Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, 2009
Cruising Utopia (2009) so far - Chapter Three
by AR

If Heidegger is the philosopher of Being,
and Bloch is the philosopher of the Not-Yet,
then Derrida is, in many ways, the philosopher of the No-Longer.

But a "no-longer" that keeps returning.

This is why Muñoz is able to bring Bloch and Derrida together in such a compelling way:

—from Bloch comes the future;
—from Derrida comes the ghost.

And the result is almost a formula for Cruising Utopia:

the queer future is inhabited by the ghosts of past possibilities.
Confused by the spectacle around me
- Allen Ginsberg
A photograph
Shows you in a London
room; books, a painting,
your smile

- James Schuyler
Roland Barthes wrote that the mark of the utopian is the quotidian.
- Jose Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, 2009
I suggest that holding queerness in a sort of ontologically humble state, under a conceptual grid in which we do not claim to always already know queerness in the world, potentially staves off the ossifying effects of neoliberal ideology and the degradation of politics brought about by representations of queerness in contemporary popular culture.

- Jose Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, 2009
the thing-that-is-not-yet-imagined
- alain badiou
Queerness is not quite here; it is, 
in the language of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a potentiality.

- Jose Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, 2009
How curious, complex, the touch, this subtle art
- Renee Vivien
I will plant companionship thick as trees.
- Walt Whitman
I’ve forgotten the way a body feels.
I’ve forgotten the way my body 
         in its loneliest midnights             didn’t devour the light  that touched it.

- Moni Garcia
Freud intuiu que o processo civilizador, que tem muitos ganhos, poderia acabar domesticando tanto o ser humano que ele perderia até mesmo o interesse pelo sexo.

- Luiz Felipe Pondé em Linhas Cruzadas, 04/06/2026
Todo processo social, político e histórico é dialético.
- Luiz Felipe Pondé em Linhas Cruzadas, 04/06/2026
no volume máximo

We have poetry
so we do not die of history.

- Meena Alexander
Neither binary nor reconstructed.
What was the word for hybrid?
Or nature’s desire for difference.
For particularity.
Because nature desires the impermissible.
And abhors the prescriptive.

- Alexis De Veaux
I am she: I am he
- Adrienne Rich
I sing the body electric
- Walt Whitman
O amor hoje está tão pobre, tem gripe,
meu hálito não está para salões.
Fico em casa esperando Deus,
cavacando a unha, fungando meu nariz choroso,
querendo um pôster dele, no meu quarto

- Adélia Prado
La comprensión es una forma del extravío.
- Antonio Gamoneda
Bewilderment is a form of wisdom.
- Fanny Howe
What is unsaid is always forming.
- Michael Palmer
The world asks us to believe it.
- Jorie Graham
Sinais valem palavras,
palavras valem coisas,
coisas não valem nada.
Entender é um rapto,
é o mesmo que desentender.

- Adélia Prado
e quando a palavra
é fuga
em sua própria armadilha

- adão ventura
a palavra
sem vestimenta,
nua,

desincorporada

- adão ventura
I used to think everything had meaning.
- William Ward Butler
Theory of mind,

theories of everything—I trained
to be an English teacher for years
before I suffered under a principal

who warned me: pronouns are heavy here,
and I agreed, though we meant
different things, he was telling me

to avoid teaching a part of speech.

- William Ward Butler
I finished the reading and looked up
Changed in the familiar ways. Now for a quiet place
To begin the forgetting. The little delays
Between sensations, the audible absence of rain
Take the place of objects. I have some questions
But they can wait. Waiting is the answer
I was looking for. Any subject will do
So long as it recedes. Hearing the echo
Of your own blood in the shell but picturing
The ocean is what I meant by

- Ben Lerner
Alexa turn off the lights, Alexa feed me
the filament of my display, sloppy picked 
apart grammar

- Alexis N. Garcia
Poetry is the plough that turns up time.
- Osip Mandelstam
The word wanders freely around the thing,
like the soul around an abandoned,
but not forgotten body.

- Osip Mandelstam
Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.
My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.

- Osip Mandelstam
Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.

- Osip Mandelstam
Tratado do vazio
Adam Zagajewski

Numa livraria encontrei-me casualmente mesmo ao lado da secção do Tao, 
  mais precisamente do Tratado do Vazio. 
Fiquei feliz, já que nesse dia eu fora completamente vazio. 
Ora essa, que encontro - que raro encontro -, o paciente encontra o 
  médico e o médico fica calado. 
Se a Rússia tivesse sido fundada
por Ana Akhmatova, se
Mandelstam fosse legislador
e Stálin apenas um personagem marginal
de uma epopeia georgiana
perdida, se a Rússia tirasse seu
hirsuto casaco de pele de urso
se pudesse viver da palavra e não
do punho cerrado, e se a Rússia, e se a Rússia

- Adam Zagajewski
Deixem de nos iludir filósofos
o trabalho não é uma dádiva o homem não é o objetivo maior

- Adam Zagajewski
Espinhos
Adam Zagajewski
  
Se os ditadores quisessem
ler os nossos poemas ferozes, raivosos
e bem trabalhados, a poesia
com certeza mudaria o mundo. Mas
as rosas também não conhecem os versos
que lhes são dedicados.
Os espinhos não bebem sangue.
A criação vive no ângulo do meu cérebro
Mas sei que serei vencida
Pela limitação das realizações humanas.

- Adalgisa Nery
Eu te amo
Antes e depois de todos os acontecimentos
Na profunda imensidade do vazio

- Adalgisa Nery
no mundo de silêncios e de símbolos
- adalgisa nery
um misto de tristeza numa paisagem grandiosa
- adalgisa nery
quero ser coisa sem motivo
- adalgisa nery
sem palavras nem gestos
- adalgisa nery
Eu sei, eu entendo, e sentiria compaixão e gratidão se estivéssemos vivos e tivéssemos liberdade para sentir, mas não, não é, Eddie? Estamos num planeta morto, como a Lua, onde é preciso seguir em frente, mas sem ousar parar e respirar um pouco, para não descobrir que não há ar para respirar.

- Ayn Rand, A revolta de Atlas, Dagny
Tentativa de definição
Mario Quintana

O homem é o animal que pensa noutras coisas.
Os crocodilos
Mario Quintana

Pior, mas muito pior mesmo do que as lágrimas de crocodilo, 
são os sorrisos de crocodilo.
Diálogo
Mario Quintana

Dois monólogos intercalados.
Neutralidade
Mario Quintana

Só Deus é imparcial – quando, como por exemplo, 
abençoa as bandeiras dos dois exércitos contrários.
(Credit: Nasa)

i love you to the moon &
chen chen

not back, let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of 
queer zest & stay up 
there & get ourselves a little 
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden
Love is the perception of individuals.
- Iris Murdoch
i’m free will agnostic
but with each conscious choice toward that ethos

- kyle carrero lopez
Avenida da Igreja
André Osório

A cidade é uma montra.
Cá fora, olhamos: de bibe,

o reflexo, fita em troco:
a morte é um guarda-nocturno.

Procuramos, entre moedas,
uma memória.
and counting
Abre-se o sinal
Sem ninguém passar

- Antonio Cicero
Devo dizer
que acordei.
Mesmo sem ser
tudo que imaginei
devo dizer
que o amei.

- Antonio Cicero
na sala decorada
pela noite
e pelo imenso desejo,
nossas xícaras
lascadas

- ana martins marques
Que este amor não me cegue nem me siga.
E de mim mesma nunca se aperceba.
Que me exclua do estar sendo perseguida
E do tormento
De só por ele me saber estar sendo.

- Hilda Hilst
Na plena solidão de um amplo descampado
- Gilka Machado
What I want is so much greater than I.
- Clarice Lispector
I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Euphoria, S03E08

I persist in demanding from life what life can scarcely give.
- André Breton

 
Euphoria, S03E08


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