April 5, 1915 Letters To Felice By Franz Kafka First Published : 1973

Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton; "Briar Rose,"

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Vladimir Nabokov

seeking, yearning, reaching hands

sleep is the first house

(excerpt) Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Ferdinand Hodler, "Night" (detail) // Pierre Jahan, Nu Plain-chant (1947)

(excerpt) Eileen Myles, "Universal Cycle", The Importance of Being Iceland

Sara Stout, "Paris Bed" // Alex Venezia

(excerpt) Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Love Poems ("Poem XII")

Mark English, "Couple" (1933) // Kenney Mencher, "A Married Couple"

(excerpt) Walt Whitman, "When I Heard at the Close of Day"

Łukasz Stokłosa, "Untitled" (2014) // Matt Lambert for Dazed

(excerpt) Jeanette Wintersion, "Disappearance I", The World and Other Places

{Words by Anaïs Nin, from The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4 (1944-1947) / Cynthia Cruz from diagnosis,The glimmering room}

[She] looked as if she had been carved out of a single pearl.

Angela Carter, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.

I love him in the way you love a lighthouse

From a distance

Not expecting warmth

But grateful for the shape of his light

I wrote him into my days

The echo of a soul lesson coming back around

I will meet him in the Center of a life

I already started to build without him

She wanted to scream, but a person who is alone—alone in the absolute sense of the word—does not scream out her despair; it is useless. Deserts do not hear. But she can do things with her hands which even a desert must notice. She can tear at the sand until the desert bleeds.

– Stig Dagerman, from “Men of Character,” The Games of Night (Quartet, 1986)

Pola X [1999 Leos Carax]