From Heart Sutra, by Yan Lianke:
Mingzheng immediately recognized Nameless’s handwriting—a mass of black strokes, with every character resembling late-autumn foliage. The characters with many strokes resembled clumps of vegetation, while those with few strokes resembled solitary sprouts. But regardless of whether they were clumps of vegetation or individual plants, they were all grazed by the sun during the day and chilled by the autumn frost at night. It was as if the individual branches and leaves had been condensed, while still retaining a great clarity of lines and structure.
Bluesky comment by @rahaeli.bsky.social:
Hell, the proverb goes back to some of the earliest Roman writing we still have: “de gustibus non disputandum”, “in matters of taste there can be no arguing”. Which means there was definitely somebody 2500 years ago yelling at someone else, insisting they’d just never tried Grandma’s garum recipe.
From Bookshops & Bonedust, by Trevor Baldree:
Her feet were bare, and she occupied all the space she deserved.
From Thistlefoot, by GennaRose Nethercott:
When you see the Kali tragus, you can almost taste lonesomeness, bitter somewhere in the back of your throat, or smell it in the air like a perfume. It represents all words left unsaid, stories untold, the memories that have been kicked up by storms and carried off across the untamed prairie. So many meanings, many names. Kali tragus, the Russian thistle, windwitch—the tumbleweed.
And…
But a folktale—a folktale can never be forgotten because it wriggles and rearranges until it sits neatly on the heart.
I want to quote all of “A Small Needful Fact,” by Ross Gay, but I don’t want to incur the wrath of copyright law. So, I’m linking to the poem at Poets.org.
From Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon:
The moon was full above the slough, and the whole world looked flattened out in grayscale: wispy clouds, grainy fields, fast-moving current. Glints of moonlight bounced off the water where harbor seals surfaced, hunting crabs along the mud flats that edged the slice of beach behind the house. Beach was an optimistic word for the narrow strip of grit, weeds, and long-dead jellyfish that stretched from Beth’s scraggly neighborhood to an old power plant and the marina. Twice a day, the bank got swallowed up in a swirl of river and seawater, then spat out again at low tide, bearing tree branches, old tires, and whatever else the Pacific Ocean didn’t want.
