baca

and you go fuck yourself
dry eye days,
here I come,
giving you a Chciano monsoon season,
here comes this Chicano cry baby,
flooding prison walls,
my children's bedrooms,
splashing and tear slinging
tears up on my ankles,
planting rice and corn and beans
in fields glimmering with my tears,
and all you dry skinned nut-cracking ball whackers,
don't want to get your killer bone-breaking boots wet,
step aside,
because I'm bring you rain.

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. "Crying Poem."

lowry

"And you know what, Thin Elderly? Sad parts are important. If I ever get to train a new young dreamgiver, that's one of the things I'll teach: that you must include the sad parts, because they are part of the story, and they have to be part of the dreams." (96)

Lowry, Lois. Gossamer. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

genesis

And all the earth was one language, one set of words. And it happened as they journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other, "Come, let us bake bricks and burn them hard." And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, "Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth." And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the human creatures had built. And the LORD said, "As one people with one language for all, if that is what they have begun to do, nothing they plot will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other's language." And the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it is called Babel, for there the LORD made the language of all the earth babble. And from there the LORD scattered them over all the earth. (11:1-9)

Genesis. Trans. Robert Alter. New York: WW Norton, 1996.

nin

Telephone wires only carried literal messages, never the subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams they delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and deaths, but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb, and one more day in it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish policeman, and roses of Sharon were too gentle a cure for suffocation. (79)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.

nin

His singing was offered to her in this cup of his mouth, and she drank it intently, without spilling a drop of this incantation of desire. Each note was the brush of his mouth upon her. His singing grew exalted and the drumming deeper and sharper and it showered upon her heart and body. Drum - drum - drum - drum - drum - upon her heart, she was the drum, her skin was taut under his hands, and the drumming vibrated through the rest of her body. Wherever he rested his eyes, she felt the drumming of his fingers upon her stomach, her breasts, her hips. His eyes rested on her naked feet in sandals and they beat an answering rhythm. His eyes rested on the indented waist where the hips began to swell out, and she felt possessed by his song. When he stopped drumming he left his hands spread on the drumskin, as if he did not want to remove his hands from her body, and they continued to look at each other and then away as if fearing everyone had seen the desire flowing between them. (58-59)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.

nin

She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life's physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moonrays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courteson depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of many women in herself were fecundated by the moon-rays because they came from that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams, containing roots reaching for all the magnificences of the past, transmitting the rich sediments into the present, projecting them into the future. (43-44)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.

nin

"There is only one relief: to confess, to be caught, tried, punished. That's the ideal of every criminal. But it's not so simple. Only half of the self wants to atone, be freed of the torments of guilt. The other half of man wants to continue to be free. So only half of the self surrenders, calling out "catch me," while the other half creats obstacles, difficulties; seeks to escape. It's a flirtation with justice. If justice is nimble, it will follow the clue with the criminal's help. If not, the criminal will take care of his own atonement." (6)

...a huge blackboard, and she took a sponge and effaced it all by a phrase which left in suspense who had been at the baths; or, perhaps, this was a story she had read, or heard at a bar; and, as soon as it was erased in the mind of her listeners, she began another...

The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only half drawn; and when the lie detecter had just begun to perceive them, another face and figure were interposed as in a dream. And, when he believed she had been talking about a woman, it turned out that she had been talking about a man; and, when the image of the man began to form, it turned out the lie detector had not heard aright: it was a young man who resembled a woman who had once taken care of Sabina; and this young man was instantly metamorphosed into a group of people who had humiliated her one night. (9)

She held her breath. That was what she was always doing, holding her breath so that the truth would never come out, at any time, not here with Alan, and not in the hotel room with a lover, who had asked questions about Alan. She held her breath to choke the truth, made one more effort to be the very actress she denied being, to act the part she denied acting, to describe this trip she had not taken, to recreate the woman who had been away for eight days, so that the smile would not vanish from Alan's face, so that his trustingness and happiness would not be shattered. (19)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.