stephanie roberts’s Reviews > The Weight of Oranges / Miner's Pond > Status Update

I think, if you have lived through a war
or have made your home in a country
not your own, or if you've learned
to love one man,
then your life is a story.

"There are many degrees of power in the world, and nowhere is the difference in degree greater than in the case of human will and human desire, just as water boils at one temperature, and molten iron at another." – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Only love sees the familiar for the first time.

Every painting is a way of saying goodbye.

it's the believer who keeps looking for proof.

We grow like rivers, get shrunk and doubled over
until we can't find the mouth of anything.
[...]
The only book I'd write again
is our bodies closing together.
That's the language that stuns,
scars, breathes into you.
[...]
I want you to promise
we'll see each other again,
you'll send a letter.
Promise we'll be lost together

You stopped a dozen feet from me.
What passed in that quiet said:
I have nothing to give you.

After a while you'll poke the fire
and drink from your favourite theme:
"impossible to paint well what you don't love"