Atikah Karim By Damien Fry For Blanc Magazine, May 2021

Cherry Harvest

“No relationship can truly grow if you go on holding back. If you remain clever and go on safeguarding and protecting yourself, only personalities meet, and the essential centers remain alone. Then only your mask is related, not you. Whenever such a thing happens, there are four persons in the relationship, not two. Two false persons go on meeting, and the two real persons remain worlds apart.”

— Osho, Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other (via minuty)

i-D

The Elevator Issue, no. 191, October 1999

Rainer Maria Rilke, "You who never arrived." The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

always choose to be with someone who is emotionally intelligent. don’t get caught up in the fact that you are loved, because love comes easy. but loving someone in the way they need, and understanding why they need to be loved like that is what a relationship is about.

From a documentary about Akha people (an indigenous tribe to mountain forests in Thailand). Like many other indigenous people in the world, they are blamed for environmental destruction (despite taking care of the land and maintaining biodiversity), and were forcefully relocated so loggers and industrial farmers could use the land and use impoverished Akha people as laborers.

Matthew Dickman, from “Montpelier” [ID in ALT]

“I whet my lips to speak your name. To kiss your hands, curling into the posture of prayer, they could almost have been carved from stone. I swear: If idolatry was my only sin, then it’s because god wasn’t watching.”

— Torrin A. Greathouse, from “Ekphrasis on Nude Selfie as Portrait of San Sebastian,” Poetry (vol. 221, no. 2, November 2022)

“Even before I touch you: how you start to imitate the way the ground fog wavers across the grass. Some nights the dew seems to soak the stars. Your laugh settling in the corners. Your words weeding the flowers.”

— Richard Jackson, from “Things I Forgot to Put on My Reminder List,” The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)