the one who wants to love you, but often isn’t good at even that

(courtesy of poetry foundation)

discovered via the paris review’s poetry rx, my very best discovery of 2019 (calling it now), “readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match.” OH. some words about “wife”:

I think a lot about how hard it is for people to see each other. How very often when we look at someone, even someone we love, what we are actually seeing is our memories of them, or our projections upon them, or our expectations, or what they represent, or so many other things, but not quite them.