Postcards from Istanbul /4

“When I met you, you were both for me: the sensual and the spiritual. The two can never separate…” – Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann Paris, 31 Oct 1957   Precious, precious one. The day closes on me again. I am left wondering just how little life is and how fleeting our time on earth….

Postcards from Istanbul /3

“When I feel like being with her I almost prefer not being with her So as not to have to leave her afterwards.” – Fernando Pessoa My precious one, Today my heart has been with only you. I miss you more. All this beauty I see fades before the way your face glows in my…

Postcards from Istanbul /2

“To write words I put a symbol in place of an absent sound. To write the words ‘I love you’ requires a further, analogous replacement, one that is much more painful in its implication. Your absence from the syntax of my life is not a fact to be changed by written words.” – Anne Carson…

Book Review: As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann My rating: 5 of 5 stars How do you write about a book like this? Wait. Let me take a breath. Then a step back. Then another. We begin again. When I read Hanya Yanagihara’s, “A Little Life”, I scarcely believed, I would find another book that moved…

Book Review: Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg

Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg My rating: 4 of 5 stars A lover told me to read this. A lover just like Anne. Sophisticated. Unattainable. Impossibly beautiful. I desisted for a while. Months. Read it, she said. “Read it. You’re all over it.” Now I have read it and I understand why this book…

After the war

  Penelope, twenty years away from you I forget the little things. The toss of your head, the tumble of your breasts as you disrobe. I wake up with a fire in my belly and an ache in my loins. And always, always this perfect thirst. “I miss you,” you say. “I miss you, and…

A letter to you, from 15 years ago

Dear S, I was waiting for your call all last night and while we were at dinner. Adrian refused to enter into a discussion with me about anything. See, she claims each time we start a conversation my blasted mobile goes off and the ringing drives her crazy. So I told her to please, please make…

How can you not return?

  Isn’t it just the truth that the places you ought to stay away from are the places you have loved the best? Ancient ruins, abandoned forts, haunted houses, and people. Some places you simply must not return to. Yet, return you do. It’s an itch you need to scratch. A boil that beseeches a…

All the world’s words are yours.

There are some words I never want to hear again. This is one of them.  This word is you. This word spells your name, only in different letters. Letters that belong to an alphabet of a language I do not speak anymore because the only other speaker no longer speaks to me. It is a dead…