Poems are not office memos.

January 18: Fell asleep to a dog barking. Woke to wind howling. Inside it, the dog continues to bark, but all the desert slopes repeat now is wind and more wind.

I want to wallpaper my writing room with scenes from Days of Heaven and then write like that movie. That’s what my manuscript Crude is supposed to be. It’s supposed to sound like the narrator from Days of Heaven and look like everything in Days of Heaven.

I know less about existence than twin fawns who died inside their mother days before she would have given birth to them.

House sparrows aren’t sparrows. They’re weaver finches. (And that is how poets tell you the news.)

After all everybody is as their coffee maker is. Everybody is as the maker is quiet or loud. Everybody is as there is maker or no maker. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of brew, their kind of viscosity, their bitterness and their aftertaste, and their pouring and their sipping and their drinking. — Gertrude Stein(ish)

There’s a poem in my throat. I don’t want it there. I don’t even want it there.

Love is coming at me from every direction. That’s how I know we’re all dying.

My husband is up. He sounds like rain.

There was a time in my life when the answer to everything was poetry. It’s still that time.

It’s hard, but not impossible, to see a man as a hook.

New Year’s Goal: Write poems that make readers blister.

I just learned that white-tailed deer chase Canada geese. My friend Kelly would have loved knowing that.

I just got a nice rejection from a literary journal. The editor wrote, I’m grateful to have read your work, especially ‘Persephone.’ The last stanza is perfect. God. Damn.

It’s interesting how love expands when we’re scared but contracts when we’re angry, which is also just being scared.

Coming off the sudden stress of the past few days, I’m in a space that’s part relief, part surge of emotion. This means I may tell every single one of you that I love you—and mean it.

Some poems are like passivation layers on exposed aluminum. They protect the poet from vulnerabilities beneath the surface, maybe reader, too.

Some poems feel like licking an old sofa.

The light is moving. Slowly, slowly, the light.

Writing is breath. As breath, writing is life.

I hear the stars hidden in the blanket-swaddled sky. I hear them beating.

Just enough light these days to give thanks to darkness.

A wallpaper-installation company whose slogan is “We’ll help you get it up.”