Devanshi Gupta

“Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full/ of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—/ to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward/ what’s larger within us, toward how we were born./

Look, we are not unspectacular things,/ we’ve come this far, survived this much. What/ would happen if we decided to survive more?”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“Love. It is not a five-star stay. It is not compliments and it is never ever flattery. It is solid. Not sweet but always nutritious always herb, always salt. Sometimes grit.”
― Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

“Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I'd always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar - though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.”
― Danusha Laméris