What one is known for, what is presented as a life’s work, is not an entirety. These other interests, away from the perfectionism and public attention of primary pursuits, could offer another, less guarded view.

I begin to feel uneasy and then I disappear.

In 1947, Dorothea Tanning was already known as a painter when the magazine Les Quatre Vents published her story “Dream It or Leave It” in an issue devoted to the Surrealists, revealing her as one of the group’s rare members with talent as both a visual artist and a writer.

For Dorothea Tanning, 1947 was a year of realized dreams.

I am afraid, too, of unforeseen events, cats, acts of violence, sickness, steep hills, the power of the unknown and my own potential. All unsurprising fears.

Sometimes I think the only true and satisfactory means of contact with those we love is by writing rather than talking.

You are about to witness a remote and covetous collaboration between flower and beast.

It’s not so much a matter of finding a fictitious self, but rather locating how to inhabit a space with presence.

The painter in Italy during the First World War.

I can feel a little bit of a story before the frame that’s the painting and a little bit of the story afterwards.

At moments like this I begin to think we’re at the beginning of a new millennium, a new vocabulary, a very new perception.

Accomplishment in fact / Is exhausted rejection

Nietzsche says that we live / our lives to live them again, / exactly as they were lived.

You know I wouldn’t love you any less / if there were no possible end to love

All a ghost wants is to be chained / to a place, to someone who can’t forget / her.

We like to say we hate the visual arts, / the ways adults address their children and pets, / the open sore or sewer we call the sea.

So many hearts / sputter to pump in the hospital / like organists playing from a reef

Maybe those women felt as mercurial and blurry as she often did. Well, not blurry, exactly: incompletely inventoried. Like a house with unexplored rooms.

For him, it was a mediation / of desire, the word in his / wooden tongue.

I watched her once unhook dead branches / from a living tree.

Beautiful words / transform into birds of light / inside a crystal eye.

It has taken me a light-year to not come to terms with dying.

Like many of you humans, I enjoy lifting small, living things, because sometimes they fear me

There is no way out if you kill / Your victory will teeter on one leg / There will be a crown of blood on your head

Something bad, something sequential, is happening to you. / Maybe not to you, but in the place you’re standing.

Is the word / a cunning bird / even in new / dark I will not / be quiet, the / feathering / covering me

No ruse better than a woman in the home, Nikhil had argued over a year ago, and eventually Sharma had agreed.

He wanted to be equal to the gaze of the sky.

Your heart burned like you had hot charcoal on it, and your tongue tasted like bitter lemon.

You were so far away from her and too scared to close the distance.

My sister and I were only small-scale sinners.