iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

i don’t know what’s more beautiful: the rainbow in a late summer sky during an evening rain or the crowd of strangers gathered in the parking lot pointing it out to one another

photo of stormy sky with a rainbow over the supermarket building

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

if you need me, i’ll be reading jack gilbert poems by lake wallenpaupack

photo of open poetry book against lake backdrop

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

the damn shame of it is how hard it is to find a man who can spell

screenshot of an opening comment on a dating app: “Die your hair - you are beautiful but gray doesn’t fit you. Click block button now haha”

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

i’m sorting through old fragments of texts + ephemera & am thoughtful about this bit by Sarah Manguso: “I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.” i’m not there yet. endless love to all of you ruminating on + reveling in another ending 🤎

It was a failure of my imagination that made me keep leaving people. All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings: moments to survive, record, and once recorded, safely forget.

I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.

Short tragic love stories that had once interested me no longer did.

What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

just over here reading old love letters and listening to sad songs and crashing coffee cups to the ground as the year is about to turn

photo of a dropped coffee mug with splattered coffee all over the ground

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

“The moment we are living in may be lovely, but if we ‘can’t wait’ for some other time, do we miss it?” — Naomi Shihab Nye

Anyway, why are we rushing around so much? The common phrase “I can’t wait” has always troubled me. Does it mean you want your life to pass more swiftly? This or that future moment will surely be better than the current moment, right? The moment we are living in may be lovely, but if we “can’t wait” for some other time, do we miss it? We are honeybees in our own lives. But we forget.

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

“…the beauty of things that are ending.” — Annie Ernaux, Getting Lost

He didn’t say he would call. (In spite of myself, I think of my mother, the last time I saw her, in April ‘86. I said, “See you Sunday,” and she did not reply.) However, he did ask me if I was going to Salon due livre, meaning that we wouldn’t see each other before then.

And yet, and yet, what tenderness, the last time. But that’s just it: the last planned meetings have the beauty of things that are ending.

What if I were never to see him again, as with Claude G in the past? That is like death. I fear the worst (he’s leaving France, ditching me, etc.)

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

it’s been a minute since i’ve published anything, so i’m especially grateful that @matchbooklitmag.bsky.social gave this little musing on love + leavings a home. you can read the full piece here: matchbooklitmag.com/mb/relles/departures

Departures
by Dina L. Relles
handed you the promised coffee with an apology: no sugar, no milk, I’m sorry.

I don’t need those things, you said, and I fell in impossible love with you all over again.

I’d come from my room carrying everything I wanted to happen that didn’t. Now the lobby was too bright and smelled like grapefruits and your face was weary in a way that felt intimate.

You spoke quietly to me in the taxi, then held me twice at the terminal, which I took to mean you loved me too, despite.

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

“I write in lieu of love, to fill that empty space above death.” — Annie Ernaux

a photo of the “Saturday 22” passage from Annie Ernaux’s GETTING LOST

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Steve Edwards (@the-big-quiet.bsky.social) on Hopper, the heart, and trying to hold on…tinyurl.com/ybh9sesa 🤍

“The heart paints as fast as it can—remember, remember, hold this fast—but there’s no catching up, no getting it back, no going home.” — Steve Edwards, The blur is a brushstroke

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

took some favorite people to a favorite place 💚

photo of 4 children from the back as they skip stones in Sweet Arrow Lake (Pine Grove, PA)

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

this favorite by Lydia Copeland Gwyn 🖤

Lydia Copeland Gwyn
Cotton

Come from your perch on the other side of the room to where I sit with my book and my open pen. I’m still yours this evening. My arms are in your shirt sleeves, my feet in your gray cotton socks. The snow falls out the window in wet, lacy flakes, and the children sleep in their room upstairs with the white noise and humidifiers. You are still mine, and I still think of you in my bed like that. Like that first night we were together. I wore my Fay Wray dress and your body enveloped me like a dark hominid hand. Your lips tasted like cherry tomatoes. You were warm and wet and a little drunk. We fucked in the bedroom while my ex phoned and phoned the living room. Later the phone calls would turn into knocking on the screen door and then a twenty-dollar bill and a love letter taped to the window. It was a summer night and we had earlier seen the Big Dipper while we shared a beer in a courtyard. We walked back to my house and kissed on my back porch. We kissed and walked. I walked backwards. You braced the small of my back. Your feet danced me across the lawn and into the wall of my basement apartment. On the way inside, my hand feeling behind me for the open door, I looked into the night sky like an astronaut glancing back on a glowing Earth. I could see the beauty and motion, the past and present, the cities turning on.

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

“Forgive us all for trying to find in this small & violent miracle of life just a little joy.” a Devin Kelly poem for your Sunday morning 🤍

The you changes. And I am no good at throwing out. Most attempts at cleaning up are a kind of sweeping under. We cannot change the size of the vessels we are, can only hope to control the spilling over, a forever drowning. Father taught me too much about love without his knowing. Forgive me if I lean too close. Forgive me if I kneel. Forgive me if I beg. I know a word can only do so much, the way you preached economy when I kept counting the ways in which we loved one another. In this city, I long for the hush that comes between one car passing & the next, how I learned to count the seconds between soft booms of thunder to gauge the speed of whatever storm brewed, kept coming. One summer my friend and I couldn’t get far enough away, saw the light night strike close enough to warm our skin. Maybe love is the burning hush it left behind. Forgive me if I fill vessels with all you never took away. Forgive me if I carry you along with me but never see you again. Forgive me for asking for forgiveness. Forgive us all for trying to find in this small & violent miracle of life just a little joy. Love has a way of reminding us how little everything else means or matters, or maybe love has a way of making everything else mean or matter more.

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

i love this little andrea cohen poem 🩶

Fellow Traveler

She went everywhere
with an empty suitcase.

You never know when
you’ll need to leave

swiftly with nothing.

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

“a love poem. a heartbreak poem. the price of the former is the latter.” sometimes the author’s note is the best part. i love @jadjosey.bsky.social’s poetry…3 new ones in Frigg: www.friggmagazine.com