“I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

Reyna N.A. (@porchbirds), All Summer Longing

Anne Carson, Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions

Richard Siken, Editor’s Pages Broken/Unbroken

“Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light.”

The daughter is sad. I’m so sad says the daughter. Why are you sad? asks the mother. The daughter doesn’t know. The days go by. The daughter isn’t getting better and the mother worries, frets, paces. The mother isn’t a doctor, she’s a poet, so she brings home a book. I’m too sad to read says the daughter but it’s not for reading, it’s for figuring: it’s a thesaurus. You can be as sad as you need to be says the mother but you must know what kind of sad you are. Are you sad-lonely, sad-desperate, sad-lacking-in-faith? The daughter sits at her desk and looks at the words she has written on the sheet of paper. It’s not that the words are any less true than she imagined, it’s not that they’re smaller than she thought, but they’re limited, they have boundaries, they’re finite, and she’s bigger than they are, surprisingly bigger and more vast than these words on the page, written in her own hand. Go figure. She starts to feel better.

• I wore his jacket for the longest time. 
• I’d live on the moon probably except I think I’d miss the moonlight
• Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. 
• You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
• But you know how I am. I push too hard.
• I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own
• The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive
• Monsters are always hungry, darling.
• Sorry about the blood in your mouth.
• I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone.
• I’m talking to you, and you know it.
• Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else
• Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing and not all of those things are good.
• Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.
• Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
• Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other
• Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.
• Everything casts a shadow.
• You could drown in those eyes
• I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth
• I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.
•  I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again.
• I believe we will be reborn, because I believe everything, and I believe that we will meet again and suffer together again.
•  Keep talking. I’ll keep walking toward the sound of your voice.
• I wanted to take him home and rough him up and get my hands inside him
• There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you
• We are all going forward. None of us are going back
• Is that too much to expect?
• I didn’t want to see it this way
• Wanna make a monster?
• It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you
• I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.
• Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.

…but you never come through.                         ― Richard Siken, Crush

“I would like to meet you all in Heaven. But there’s a litany of dreams that happens somewhere in the middle. Moonlight spilling on the bathroom floor. A page of the book where we transcend the story of our lives, past the taco stands and record stores. Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.”

“I surrender my desire for a logical culmination. I surrender my desire to be healed. The blurriness of being alive. Take it or leave it, and for the most part you take it.”

“Oh, the body—its hungers, needs, and limitations. You look at somebody and you realize that they’re in there, inside there, somewhere, and how will you ever reach them, understand them?”

“And no one can ever figure out what you want, and you won’t tell them, and you realize the one person in the world who loves you isn’t the one you thought it would be, and you don’t trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy.”

“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses — I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole.”

“What else was in the woods? A heart, closing.”

“I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.”

“I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard to make it love.”

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”