I don’t remember a time in my life when I could look at an El Camino and not immediately think of my father.
I have the hands of a 77-year-old man. That is to say, I have my father’s hands—the ones I imagine he would have if he were still alive. It’s like they started aging at a rapid pace the day he died so I would always carry part of him with me.
If you write as if you are a writer, you’re self-conscious. If you write as if you aren’t one, you’re disingenuous.
These trees are missing their arms.
And that was the moment the thought-ghost spirited away all my good ideas.
I want what I want, and I will hold my breath until I get it.
It’s been raining so long I can’t see the rain. When I look out my window, I only see dull sky, sometimes hope of sun.
Truth be told, I don’t like the rain right now. It’s messing with my dreams—has brought my mother back from the dead three nights straight. She’s like her old self, only kind and apologetic. The two things I wanted from her when she was alive.
When my father died, it rained and rained and rained, five days in a row without letting up, or at least that’s how I remember it. It was atypical weather for Oklahoma, not at all like the water rationing that forced my father to put in a well so he could water the lawn or wash his car whenever he damn near pleased, not just for a fixed amount of time on alternate days.
My mother couldn’t stop crying in the days following the funeral. She wailed to him in her bedroom, on her knees. She begged him to tell her why he’d left her. And she moaned about the rain. She didn’t want rain falling on his grave. I think she imagined the new soil being washed away, imagined him unable to settle into the earth. I’m not sure exactly what she imagined.
Doesn’t all the rain bother you, she asked me.
No, I answered.
He was dead. How could I be bothered by the weather?
For years, I blamed my mother for the nightmare I had a week or so after my father died. I was at the cemetery. It was raining, deep mud everywhere. My father rose from the mud that covered his plot and began walking toward me. He had no skin. There was nothing holding his bones together, so they wobbled back and forth with every step. Almost like dancing.
There has been good rain, too. My first all-out thunderstorm in Kansas City, rain carried by wind nearly parallel to the ground, drenching my giggling friends and me and sending our inside-out umbrellas to the air. Jon and I, soaked, running through an Iowa cornfield after having sex. Swimming in the rain before I knew it wasn’t safe to swim in the rain.
At least six more months of rain here in Seattle. And days as short as a memory or a dream.
I wake up with my head smashed face-down on a pillow the consistency of a marshmallow. When Lora used to get hungry in her sleep, she’d wake up chewing on her pillow, I think. Was it the consistency of a marshmallow? But the more important question is how did I get here? I am barely awake, so it’s hard to put meaningful thoughts together. In this state, factoids about friends I had two decades ago come to me readily, but I am unable to piece together the events that led me here, to this bed. With my mind still stuck like a turntable needle in a scratched record on the image of Lora noshing on her pillow, I try to fish from short-term memory more pertinent information, like what day it is.
With one eyeball-goop-caked eye, the one not pressed smack-dab in the soft body of the warm pillow, I try to focus on what’s around me. I am in the guest bedroom. The LCD display on the radio alarm-clock reads 2:15 p.m. I vaguely remember having had big plans today. I was going to clean the house and groom my toenails. Did I do that stuff?
My brain, about half awake now, gives me the answers I’ve been searching for. It is Sunday. No, I did not clip my nails. The house is in the same filthy state it’s been in for weeks. Instead I ended up doing what I always do on Sundays: I took a nap. That explains why I am in bed. Having determined that I am not in danger of missing work and that I really didn’t have anything cool planned after all, my wildly relaxed body pairs up with the half of my brain that is still slumbering. They determine that I am going back to sleep. I take a deep breath and settle into the mattress. It’s gonna be a long nap.
Then something terrible happens. Just as I am about to be taken again by Sleep—my sweet afternoon lover who can please me for hours on end—the awake part of my brain reveals it has a different agenda. It wants to get up and write. In an attempt to draw me out from under the covers, that spry part of my mind starts documenting the moment. It writes the first phrase, I wake up with my head smashed face-down on a pillow … . Before I know it, it has completed the first sentence and is on to the second. And the third. In seconds, it has the whole first paragraph completed. Then, in a startling and rare display of mental agility, it leap-frogs to the end and ties everything up with a surprise ending.*
This is what I get for reading Gabriel García Márquez before taking a nap.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying what the loquacious portion of my brain is stringing together is any good. I am drawing no comparison between the quality of my own writing and that of Márquez. I am just saying that reading tends to stir up words, and once excited, those words want to be expressed. I tell myself I can continue sleeping. I will remember these words later, I half-whisper, half-snore to myself. But I know that’s not the case. There’s no way I can remember the whole first paragraph as well as the surprise ending.* As I lie in bed, I know I have a choice to make: Continue to sleep in my extraordinarily coooooomfy guest bed or get up and make my way to the computer. Guess which option I chose.
I’ve tried to put some measures in place so I can capture ideas without having to immediately flesh them out. I have a DAT voice recorder I carry in my purse. That works OK when I have an idea in the car or some other private place. But I am loathe to use it in public, where I might draw attention making verbal notes like, “nude, towel, gay porn, heat” or “80, new tits, dead.” So I also keep pen and paper handy when I want to be discreet. But even these methods don’t ensure I will successfully capture ideas for later development.
Take the following notes I’ve left for myself in the past week alone. They make absolutely no sense to me now, and I have no idea what to do with them:
1. toilet rat fear
I wrote that one in the middle of the night. I think I’d just gone to the bathroom. Clearly, it means I am afraid of a vicious rat lurking in the toilet that will jump up and bite my pretty ass when I sit down to pee, but the bigger story I had in mind is lost on me now.
Then there’s this one, which I came across yesterday and have no recollection of even having written:
2. cut thing dick thing
It’s in my handwriting, so I know I wrote it. But what does it mean? What riddles do these words hold that I no longer have the power to decipher? Is this about sex? Am I the cut thing and LoveShack is the dick thing? Or is it something else entirely? I’m afraid I will never know.
Then there’s this note:
3. fat albert
No clue what that one’s all about. I even watched all four episodes of “House of Cosbys” today to jog my memory, but no such luck.
Well, I am glad I got that out. Now I am off to cut my toenails. I might even polish them, too.
—*
* I had to scrap the surprise ending my brain came up with. It was over the top and my budget didn’t allow for the special effects that would have been required.
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
—
And when I didn’t speak / I became a secret, a testimony / against my own body. — Carl Adamshick
I was immense / and empty out there. I filled myself / with their lives, I stored up / the whole town, generations / of the town, other towns. / I have them now and it’s nothing. — Carl Adamshick
Apaths are an integral part of the sociopath’s arsenal and contribute to sociopathic abuse. Sociopaths have an uncanny knack of knowing who will assist them in bringing down the person they are targeting. It is not necessarily easy to identify an apath; in other circumstances, an apath can show ample empathy and concern for others—just not in this case. The one attribute an apath must have is a link to the target. — Addiction Today
It’s too / ridiculous, this ordering the noise / the past makes into music. What’s it for? — Kim Addonizio
like the brother I spent my childhood hiding from in my father’s closet / below rows of suit coats, next to the electric buffer for his shoes. — Kim Addonizio
Teacher teacher me / in the front / can’t / you see / my hand / pray / tell / why / white / hands / keep / grasp / -ing / at / all / hours / in the / dark — Matt Adrian
In the leaf litter, something tries to hide its own heartbeat. — Matt Adrian
we are what we are, / the two of us pulling together to form a single passage / through the dark — Neil Aitken
I seem to myself, as in a dream, / An accidental guest in this dreadful body. ― Anna Akhmatova
We’re waiting for a war to begin / or a delectable sweet to eat after lunch. — Jeff Alessandrelli
To me, in a poem the writer reaches for the reader and the reader reaches back—in this moment of contact the unknowable or unthought is illuminated. — Kazim Ali
I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. ― Dorothy Allison
It’s the first thing I think of when trouble comes―the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible. ― Dorothy Allison
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made. ― Dorothy Allison
All my life / I’ve always dreamed of a somewhere. / It took me awhile to realize / that somewhere is here. — Odessa Alpuerto
The trains let us / on and the trains let us off. We wait for the next. Our bags / overflow. These people, this pretty. We stand on the / platforms, dressed like we are cured of pretty. — Hala Alyan
but though I have looked everywhere, / I can find nothing / to give myself to: / everything is / magnificent with existence — A. R. Ammons
how heavy this bag of knowledge as I hit the road again, / the road inside me, the questioning, the yes, hope, / that finally, in a day I’ll not live to see, we’ll be free. / Or not: our telescopes and satellites still roaming / when the earth is an orbiting, smoking ash, / sending back the knowledge that might have saved us. — Doug Anderson
What can a man / like me do besides take one word after another / right out of my body and hand it to you? — Doug Anderson
I plucked up an acorn, / thinking I would find a place to plant it on my walk. / Not beside the road. / Not in the mowed field by the cemetery. / Not in a stranger’s lawn. / There’s something about an errand to plant an oak that shows much of what troubles our world, / a place where a new tree is inconvenient. — Jarod K. Anderson
There are two paths to magic: imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron. — Jarod K. Anderson
There’s something about an errand to plant an oak that shows / much of what troubles our world, / a place where a new tree is inconvenient. — Jarod K. Anderson
This morning, I found a bluejay feather tucked like a bookmark in the pages of red and yellow leaf litter.
That book tells the story of here, where unguessable magic drifted through time like seeds on the wind, taking root where I would find my parcel of days and sip black coffee on a muddy trail.
What can we say about a universe, ancient and vast, that populates its tiniest corners with oaks and jays, impossible bits of art hidden away in a turning gallery beneath an ocean of chance and empty dark?
What is that if not kindness?
Kindness for its own sake.
— Jarod K. Anderson
This bizarre pretense that everyone is equally good at everything doesn’t stand up to reality. — Annoyed Librarian
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. — Diane Arbus
What remains is this deer at the edge of the woods, my dappled antlers my toiled meaning & no meaning making music like a heretic. After all what is a soul crawling out of the black dirt if it has no teeth or nails. — William Archila
At first we loved because / we startled one another. — Rae Armantrout
To believe non-referentiality is possible is to believe language can be divorced from thought, words from their histories. — Rae Armantrout, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Vol 1, No. 1
The wordplay / Between us gets very intense when there are / Fewer feelings around to confuse things. — John Ashbery
You can always catch up with the past. I think it’s very important to read what’s being written now and figure out how you stand in relation to it and how it represents what you do or don’t want to get into. — John Ashbery
About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along — W. H. Auden
Everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster. — W.H. Auden
The association of singing with women is an inevitable consequence considering the connection between the patriarchal construction and representation of woman first and foremost as a bodily entity and the presence of more bodily elements in singing than in instrumental music. To elaborate on the latter, there is literally more body in the singing voice (“more breath, more diaphragm muscles, a more open mouth”) because of the intensified and exaggerated vocalization when singing. Furthermore, singing is inherently a more embodied, more carnal realm than instrumental music in that the sound is produced within the performer’s body, from her throat, whereas in instrumental music, the sound source, whether piano, violin or others, is placed outside the performer’s body. — Linda Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens
Our lifetime is so brief. And to live it out in these circumstances, among these people, in this body? Nothing to get excited about. — Marcus Aurelius
The world as a living being — one nature, one soul. — Marcus Aurelius
if it’s true we’re infused with something not found in doorknob bird or bee / why am I confused about all the important things — Elizabeth Austen
What does she see / when she looks back at me, glassed-in, / unfeathered, gaping? — Elizabeth Austen
All my life, certainly for as long / as I’ve known I had a life, I was / like the sparrow right now outside / my window, flying headfirst, incessantly, / into what must seem, to her, like sky. — Cameron Awkward-Rich
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
—
My birds of prey are not bomb / droppers, but my broken immune system clawing / and pecking inside my body’s basement. — Sara Backer
Are we willing to put love into action even if we ourselves don’t physically survive? — Carolyn Baker
If the answer is ‘yes,’ then two things are essential. First, bearing witness to the deepening horrors of climate chaos; and second, committing ourselves to compassionate service to all other living beings—since they are going to suffer with us. — Carolyn Baker
Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain
The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
—
by Li Bai, translated By Sam Hamill
To be disabled is to have a minority body, but not to have a broken or defective body. — Elizabeth Barnes
Midfield, attached to nothing, the skylark singing.
— Basho
Wherever we are in life, whatever people we are responding to, let us be witnesses to those who are most abandoned, who need our care. — Father Michael Bassano
I think nature is personal. — Jan Beatty
On this thoroughly unique and irreplaceable Saturday morning, it was like this. This is my inadequate attempt to capture it, even though it can’t be captured, can’t be preserved. — Lynn Behrendt
This is my inadequate attempt to capture it, even though it can’t be captured, can’t be preserved. — Lynn Behrendt
It is silly: this constant falling, this ebullient animal / tumble, this dizzy, over-worded, breathless groping / to some place only named in ancient, unknown tongues. — John Belk
When the hot air fades / when the dampness comes / in sleep / in waking / when I am ancient in my movements / a humming corpse / resting on / pillows / How will I be found / will they feed me the coins I will need / Who will kiss my falling / when I fall — Chase Berggrun
I give my best to the shape / of clouds and the dead / in their resting places — Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal
I give my best to the shape / of clouds and the dead / in their resting places — Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal
There are four channels on the black and white TV which seem swept from the cosmic corners of an emptiness you’re learning about in school, along with Sex Ed and its ragged chalkboard diagrams of ungainly organs deployed with all the dignity of trying to smuggle accordions across state lines. — Simeon Berry
There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. — Wendell Berry
Even after we called the neighbors for water, more water, and the volunteer fire department came to mist the dying herd, cattle kept falling. They died all day long until even the sun grew tired of watching. — Darla Biel
Each moment / builds a new universe / and I need to find / you there. — Simeon Berry
The only way people can be writers is if they feel like they can be one. — Lisa Bickmore
When you memorize a poem, it inhabits you, and you inhabit it. — Kim Blaeser
Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by visible marks. — Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933)
A cocktail dress achieves its effect through elegant abbreviation; shouldn’t the poem do the same? — Dave Bonta
And in any case the whole notion of luck represents an absurd attempt to project consistent, self-centered narratives onto chaotic, impersonal events. — Dave Bonta
We are little more than large and awkward guests in a world of insects, I sometimes think.— Dave Bonta
we bought it all / the cheat and the war / and the nothing / but night tomorrow — Dave Bonta
The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses. — Louise Bourgeois
What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. — Louise Bourgeois
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. ― Jorge Luis Borges
Something signals me / to skulk the pasture with the soft paw / of the body, to snap the hasp / and climb inside the kitchen window. / A wolf’s no scavenger. / Hunger licks its tongue / across the danger of my teeth. — Ash Bowen
It seems illogical to preserve a social order when the social order is itself only a false dilemma of death. — Anne Boyer
Emotions … continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body. — Tara Brach
Sensations in the body are ground zero, the place where we directly experience the entire play of life. — Tara Brach
When we leave our bodies, we leave home. — Tara Brach
When you’re with fear and befriending it, the who you are enlarges, and [the fear] becomes like a wave in your ocean. — Tara Brach
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. — Ray Bradbury
The comfort / of unhealthy patterns blushing harder than rubies. / I would do what I couldn’t as a child and turn from you. — Traci Brimhall
We gender people as soon as we see them. That’s just the American way. — KB Brookins
Dying or illness is a kind of poetry. It’s a derangement. — Anatole Broyard
Accessibility wasn’t one of the virtues I learned coming up. Great poems are rough, crude, loud, gnarled, hermetic. They are thinking great ideas but they aren’t talking to you about it. — Sharon Bryan
When you know what a poem is trying to do and understand how it is working, then you become useful. The poem has every clue you’re ever going to get. Stop worrying about what’s not there. You can do what you want with a poem, but it’s only OK if you take it back to the poem and the poem says, Yeah, that’s OK. — Sharon Bryan
We are all born in Oklahoma, in a certain way. — Andrew Brusletten
and when people come to visit and / shoot my hours through the head they / offer nothing interesting or constructive. / I find myself resenting them and / their chatter / their idle ways / since I am always fighting for each minute — Charles Bukowski
Like a hummingbird in our hands, we must hold our convictions with a relaxed fist — Laura Caitlin Burke
You can tell them anything if you just make it funny, make it rhyme. And if they still don’t understand you, then you run it one more time. — Bo Burnham
We grow wings to fly but have roots to return to and there, and there, for the grace of God, go I. — Mark Burns
One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know. … Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough. … So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. — William S. Burroughs
it takes me 10 minutes / to write a poem / sometimes / & then / I want to whisper or / shout it about / town — Mairead Byrne
With our thoughts we make the world. — from the Dhammapada, as translated by Thomas Byrom
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
—
An audience is a group of people listening. The more devotedly this is done, that is the more attentive one is to each sound and the more curiosity one has about those to come, the more an audience is an audience. — John Cage, from Zero: Contemporary Buddhist Life and Thought, Vol. III, 1979.
We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we’re alive to use them. — John Cage
When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. — John Cage
When I first saw fingers, I said, “I’ll take ten of those.” / Hairs were another matter. / Because I couldnt count ’em, I just took as many as I could carry. / In this way, I gradually put my body together. — Alex Caldiero
I can’t think how you bring yourself / to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked / the counselor they called in to the school, / and she said something like, “What better ink / to write the language of the heart?” — Rafael Campo
Artists, like everyone else, must take up their oars, without dying, if possible—that is to say, by continuing to live and create. — Albert Camus
Because the fields of my childhood vanished, / I carry smoke in my hair. I bed dank dirt in my / hands. — Tina Carlson
Everything I know about love and its necessities / I learned in that one moment / when I found myself / thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon / at a man who no longer cherished me. — Anne Carson
There are things unbearable. / Scorn, princes, this little size / of dying. — Anne Carson
Trust me. The trotting animal can restore / red hearts to red. — Anne Carson
Slowly the summer warmth was drained from the water. The young crabs, mussels, barnacles, worms, starfish, and crustaceans of scores of species had disappeared from the plankton, for in the ocean spring and summer are the seasons of birth and youth. — Rachel Carson
So sweet / are we / to know / earth’s calloused / verses — Camille Carter
I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. — Catullus
Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. — C. P. Cavafy
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. — C. P. Cavafy
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. — C. P. Cavafy
After this I’m going to cut out my tongue and use it as fertilizer for all / the flowers I’m going to grow in every window of my house. / I’m telling you there’s an after. / I’m telling you this will end. — Sarah Certa
I want to spend a day not thinking my usual thoughts: / how many warm beds there are in the world and how still my hands are homeless. — Sarah Certa
we / are just like everyone else / trying to build a house out of flames / in a world full of flames — Sarah Certa
how you pull me out from under / the blue-glass table / then fix me like bark / against your kitchen counter. / how you separate the blood / from sacred deermeat. easy, / easy. — Amrita Chakraborty
What I can see is that saving public land is saving ourselves. — Cody Chamberlain
The town I call home, it boasts a bumper crop / of white life. Our white life seem ready to grow / on all the land we can claim. — Sara Biggs Chaney
Read poetry so when you are no longer lonely and are wrapping your arms and legs around your beloved your beloved will tell you “I have never known arms and legs to have such wild abandon.” — Dan Chelotti
The world seems to be a certain thing / until a moment illuminates the text / so brightly it becomes unreadable. — Allisa Cherry
Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up. — Pema Chödrön
The pain is the wake-up call. — Pema Chödrön
Someday we’ll lie in dirt. / With mouths and mushrooms, the earth / will accept our apology. — Franny Choi
Our glances, our smiles are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking. — Hélène Cixous
I tell myself in my more curmudgeonly moods that relationships with animals are preferable to those with people. I keep forgetting that people are in fact animals: complicated, conflicted, gloriously noble and hilarious animals. — Chris Clarke
Get as close as possible to who and what you are, and you will become original. — Kevin Clark
To write in your own voice means taking a risk. — Kevin Clark
We carry different authentic voices within ourselves. — Kevin Clark
You have to risk embarrassment to write in a voice that is yours. — Kevin Clark
I wonder what Rorschach / would make of this place, this / asymmetrical black hole or space / or face or possibly the shape / of things to come — Kim Clark
I’m tired / of small catastrophe, the delicate / balance between shrugged-off accident / and tiny horror — Abigail Cloud
Writing is an act of love. If not, it is merely paperwork. — Jean Cocteau
a body is a meaty thing, a weighty one / it lugs itself around, beats on glass, destroys itself in what light remains — Elizabeth Colen
Feels like I’m drifting off / to some great mistake—here, to a nameless / atoll somewhere in the Pacific, / seeking—what? — Daniel Comiskey and C.E. Putnam
i came along like an accident, just after my mother’s first miscarrage. i dropped into her life like a toy from a claw machine. who’d thought she’d win a prize, much less the one she wanted. — John Compton
those poems, / like mottled wings, / are my soul. — John Compton
If you haven’t been stabbed or shot, if they took your money under threat and left, consider a poem. — CAConrad
Poetry has NEVER BEEN MORE ALIVE AND I FILL MY TANK WITH IT EVERY MORNING ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE! — CAConrad
The point of experiencing love is to engage the greater openings. — CAConrad
We need to treat our creative organs like they are vital organs, and we need to protect them. — CA Conrad
Instead of writing a book review, / I write another review of my own / pair of socks. What makes someone else / a perfect judge of my legs? I’m my own / tiny branch in a series of broken / poetry books that I made myself. — Juliet Cook
Poetry is not all that popular; nor is my vagina. — Juliet Cook
Oh and let’s not forget / the heartbreak, / the heartbreak of newly-mown grass, / of any and every awful beauty. — Kay McKenzie Cook
We have homeostatic biological systems. Disease results because of an imbalance of homeostasis. — Dr. Ryan Cooley
how do you come / to be when there are no others, except / science fiction? I am a child feeling / extraterrestrial; whose history, untold, / is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction — Rio Cortez
In one story I come from a sea god / with the forest as my mother, and in / the other, I have no mother at all. — Rio Cortez
he loved her as a drowning man / loves a drowning woman, weary, fish-breathed / and failing — Krista Cox
In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth. — Caleb Crain, from “Twilight of the Books”
The third and the last— / he died with / and gave up loving / and lived with her. — Robert Creeley
One eye goes laughing / One eye goes crying / Through the trials / And trying of one life — King Crimson
A California of snow and the surprise / Of illness. I throned myself in the white / Noise of its silence and watched as the world / Fell away. — Cynthia Cruz
An IV drip of consumption, whether or not / I want it. Fashion and excess. / Decadence, and its magnificent diamond / Of glut, / Glittering its warn doom and contagion. — Cynthia Cruz
Subverted my psychosis to watery ornament. / Was found drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city / With no electricity, all lines cut. / The brain, a kaleidoscopic disco. — Cynthia Cruz
There will be no other / Life, other than the sweet / Lavender, sweet / Blossoming dream / Of this one. — Cynthia Cruz
This is not meant to be a koan / Or a fable. / I am telling you everything. / One day they’ll remove / The memory out of me. — Cynthia Cruz
The others didn’t let me peep, she mewed beneath a grate / until I found her: mutilated, undernourished. No sibling, no mother. Her / paws were dry magic beads. I touched them. All the love I was not allowed / to give in the human house, she let me. She let me touch them one by one. — Jessica Cuello
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart / i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) — E. E. Cummings
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
—
Right now, I’m doing something that matters to me—which is simply putting words on a page. It’s a privilege, too, the allowance to write these words for an audience that I care about—an audience that is interested in what I have to say. — Mark Danowsky
From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you. — Ram Dass
The future is light drifting like water, / light emptying itself on the white / beaches of the earth, / on the sidewalks of cities, / at roadsides where the dying watch their own ghosts / rising — Joyce Ellen Davis
My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; / they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; / you cross me at your peril, I swallow light / when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin — Kwame Dawes
This is how a man seizes / what he wants, how a man / turns the world over in dreams, / eats a solid meal and waits / for death to come like nothing, / like the open sky, like light / at early morning. — Kwame Dawes
We who gave, owned nothing / learned the value of dirt, how / a man or woman can stand / among the unruly growth, / look far into its limits, / a place of stone and entanglements, / and suddenly understand / the meaning of a name, a deed — Kwame Dawes
this is how it all starts, and now that they’ve found me / things are only going to get louder around here / louder until I give up or give in. — Holly Day
I believe authentic peer support lives at the intersection of love and outrage. — Pat Deegan
For a long time I considered / Hating everything in the world. Instead, I decided / To huff it. All of it. Porcelain. Impotence. The taste of wounds. — Nick Demske
I will make me beautiful if it takes / Uglying everything else — Nick Demske
We draw ponies. / Over and over again, to keep the fires of hell / At bay. Pretty ponies. — Nick Demske
But we are exoskeletons, / vain and lordly, thinking we are hair, skin, nails, teeth.— Risa Denenberg
Either you swallow the pill or you refuse to swallow the pill. You can’t do both, our current model of time being what it is. — Risa Denenberg
My bedraggled / animal-body vetoes evolution, wants to crawl off / behind the couch and die like an old house-cat. — Risa Denenberg
There is not enough salve / on the continent to swathe this busted body — Risa Denenberg
My love for you, my love, for my friends, untethers and floats, / snaps apart and off me like the I.V. tubes and monitor wires / the flailed arms of an octopus unfolding without gravity, / as I reach up in a Frankensteinian effort to shut off my monitors, / the constant alarming of the human prototype my own body keeps rejecting — Tory Dent
I wanna end this prophylactic tour / Afraid that no-one around me / Understands my potato / Think I’m only a spud boy / Looking for a real tomato — DEVO
In my chest I am two-hearted always— / love and what love becomes / arrive when they want to, and hungry. — Natalie Diaz
The things that never can come back, are several. / Childhood, some forms of Hope — the Dead. — Emily Dickinson, as written on the back of a coconut cake recipe card
That watery light people get sometimes / when they’re first arriving / and when / they’re / leaving for good — Michael Dickman
I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, / shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine / to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed / urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. — Deborah Digges
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head / Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood / But then I was young. — Carol Ann Duffy
Any fictionist knows that one event, even if poorly executed, can make another happen, the slightest authenticity creating a path to the hidden. — Stephen Dunn
You come to the realization that you probably hate your partner. Naturally, you marry this person, move upstate, and build a tree house. — Bryn Durgin
For more than a decade, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically.
—
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. — Albert Einstein
We need to decolonize our language. — Nawal El Saadawi
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice — T. S. Eliot
To be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered; involved with past and future. / Only through time is time conquered — T.S. Eliot
I have three closets and one / is filled with my black clothes—the crying closet—dark when the door opens— / clothes difficult to tell apart — Carol Ellis
he will smile at her way of doing things / the way he smiled at your way of doing things / and at night, he will draw her close, / like you, assimilated, beloved. — C Malcolm Ellsworth
From the porch / I watched you become shadowless, / then featureless, until I knew / you couldn’t see either, and still / the dusk rang out, your aim that easy; / between the iron stakes you had driven / into the hard earth yourself — Claudia Emerson
What I want to say is that culture—art, if you like—has an important set of functions in preparing us for the future. — Brian Eno
You are a poet and sometimes it helps you / and sometimes it distances you from others. — Shira Erlichman
Let me warn you now: / There is no shame in running away, no / lie you have to tell for being afraid. We / are all supposed to jump. — Justin Evans
I want the right line / for our marriage, but the exact emotion / is a peach packed in ice. I cannot accept this, / though clearly, here it is, cold / and ripe, and now, in hand, passed / between us like a desperate artifact. — Kerry James Evans
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
—
The flyswatter was / a whip. The flyswatter was a flyswatter. / I was thrown into a fire ant bed. I wanted to be / a man. It was summer in Texas and dry. / I burned. — Tarfia Faizullah
What matters is the individual movements that you can have with other people and maybe, by this strange magic, you write these little characters in black and white on a page and someone picks it up somewhere and they feel heard or understood or comforted. Even if the poem is about the darkest thing in the world, someone else felt that. You know, you can talk in these big terms. All I can do is speak for myself and say my life has been literally saved by some of those moments. — Joseph Fasano
for years she tells me / we are never so blessed / as to lose the things / we have left behind / or to survive clean / the water’s determined rinse — Jose Faus
I never saw writing as being not art. They’re the same medium. They’re giving you the same things.” — Jose Faus
[paraphrasing] In painting, there are some things that come easier. He talks about the time he saw a log pop out when painting two colors against each other. Painting gives you a strong emotional response, makes you feel more. Words make you feel, they want to go deeper. Dan Jaffe talks about the way words rub against each other. Words can be strict. Color can be freeing. — Jose Faus
Jose Faus tries to find enough “animas” in something to be interested in it. He refers to switching between languages as “code switching.” His real father was out of his life by the time he was three years old.
One nail at the foot / a fecund rabbit / a slithering snake / a bouquet infused / with rose madder eyes / alizarin fugitive color / dripping cadmium bands / thick impasto whites / layer upon layer / ceremoniously ordained — Jose Faus
God is a potato / and a can of boiling water / and it has never been otherwise. / There is no god you cannot eat / or swing against an enemy. — Ari Feld
I saw one in a grocery store / come out with a pint / I saw another come out / with nothing / I saw another putting a rope / through the loops of his pants / I saw one / with a bird on his shoulder — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The small one, / the one joined with the sky, / the one we carried, / the one we sang / into the blue, into the black — Greg Field
You’re not a citizen of language or memory, / but I am. — Kathleen Flenniken
Let me drift, let me come / to nothing for a while. Let nothing come to me, let / a hush move with the seeping certainty of water — Ruth Foley
our liver is oak, / it filters your blood like rain through / the leaves it clutches even in January. / It sprouts acorns and will not let them drop. — Ruth Foley
Your liver is oak, / it filters your blood like rain through / the leaves it clutches even in January. / It sprouts acorns and will not let them drop. — Ruth Foley
I don’t want to go down the street smiling like a salesman trying to sell the product of me. — Melissa Fondakowski
Reading poetry requires a quietness not unlike meditation, where oftentimes attempts at “making logical sense” of a poem will both alienate you from the poem, and ruin the poem’s—for lack of a better word—duende. — Melissa Fondakowski
Poetry is what maintains our capacity for contemplation and difficulty. — Carolyn Forché
I am 18 years of age and a proud member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. I believe the most intoxicating aspect about poetry is its tendency to defy the structures that we’ve built around ourselves to comprehend the world in a material, systematic way, and open our eyes, ears, and mind to the unspoken insight of the soul. I truly believe that, in the face of rising hate, greed, and abuse of power, poetry is a form of unapologetic liberation. — Domonic Leading Fox
That’s the very bluff which peers down into / the river. The enemy: the river— / the water violent flowing surging so horribly and deadly / it’s the Devil, I reckon. — Dominic Leading Fox
He curled as / tightly as when he fell. Head tucked. / Isn’t that how it is? Head up, head down, / death. No matter the matter. — Sarah Miller Freehauf
Subtle ways to sign our names / in concealed, sheltered places / where those who search will find them. — Meg Freer
I cannot accept that the opposite of desire looks so much like loss. — Joseph Fritsch
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
—
By arrogance I mean that when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. — John Gallaher
It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs. In the world of imagination, all things belong. If you take that on faith, you may be foolish, but foolish like a trout. — John Gallaher
Time doesn’t know which genre this is, / so it’s using all of them. — John Gallaher
The wealthiest 1% are protected by the law but are not bound by it. The bottom 99% are bound by the law but are not protected by it. — Scott Galloway
Like species, poems are not invented, but develop out of a kind of discourse, each poet tensed against another’s poetics, in conversation. — Forrest Gander
At least when placentas clap their / hands while we all play / patty cake, / they are not foreshadowing / the sins / of generations that / do nothing else but / feast upon weakness. — Robert Gano
Some people say I communicate exactly / like goose liver / force fed by / an invisible-handed economy — Robert Gano
Everything but “I LOVE YOU” is small talk. — Andrea Gibson
The first time in my life I’d ever rested, / the first time I didn’t have to play a role / I’d never really wanted to get. / That’s the medicine it is / to be finally seen by someone. — Andrea Gibson
I pray he’s high on the long line rivered across the country / of his open palm held out the window / while driving and singing along / to a stranger’s favorite song he suddenly knows / all the words to but doesn’t know why. — Andrea Gibson
I say moon is horses in the tempered dark, / because horse is the closest I can get to it. — Jack Gilbert
The heart / never fits / the journey. / Always / one ends / first. — Jack Gilbert
We stand / looking at the ruin of our garden / in early November. — Jack Gilbert
Earth pollution identical with Mind pollution, consciousness / Pollution identical with filthy sky. — Allen Ginsberg
I’ll tell you / what I was meant to be— / a device that listened. — Louise Glück
When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges. — Louise Glück
All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I’ve been working in the language of music all my life, and it’s within that language that I’ve learned how ideas can unfold. — Phillip Glass
The word “cancer” follows me. It is the scariest word / in the language, scarier somehow than even “death.” I am being / murdered by my own body. The sparrows go on chirping their / simple three-note song as if there is no extra time for complexity. — Howie Good
now i can’t believe— / that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom / used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”— / all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as: / life is merely / to ovum and sperm / and where those two meet / and how often and how well / and what dies there. — Renée Nicole Good
Winnowed, we are—the wind / in widdershins spin; the clock hiding / its souvenirs in a blue wound. — Jessica Goodfellow
Every landscape turns inside out / as we journey through. Shadows stretch but the stars / keep swallowing us. — Brent Goodman
a filigree of illusion against light / that like crab in sand disappears / into the dark heart of nowhere. — Uma Gowrishankar
Hollowing the walls that make my home, I build a scaffold to hold an empty space. Bricks crumble when intimacy pours through the hole like loosened cement. It’s time to leave the building that exists only in my heart and nowhere else. — Uma Gowrishankar
If gold coins are anathema for an ascetic, what about words / that like lust tangle thoughts? — Uma Gowrishankar
the darkness of the tree line broken / only by my brother, who runs to me / with a look of great hope / carrying the tiny blind unicorn / we, together, are meant to save — Andrew Grace
Nature is making and / Unmaking itself at once — Jason Gray
I’m just like all the rest. I’m in the WORLD THAT IS. — Spalding Gray
Trace my gender / back to its oldest root & you will find my father’s footprint / on my chest, sinking all the way down to my blood. — Torrin A. Greathouse
Particular / and luminous, things tilt / into vision. — Samuel Green
There was the voice in your head the first time / we came / I will die here / like a benediction, light as the first leaf / fall, and you unafraid. — Samuel Green
We have only / the compass of how we walk here / how our feet move / over the soil that will feed us. — Samuel Green
What you thought was a rock / moves, and you think other. / Whatever you focus on becomes / something else, moves away / from its joining. — Samuel Green
You begin by not knowing / where you are, by just / standing and looking for landmarks. — Samuel Green
Fish! Fish! White sun! Tell me we are one / and that it’s the others who scare me, / not you. — Linda Gregg
An illness weakens a handshake; an illness within a handshake; the handshake equals water. November will end soon, I don’t know who I’ll be in December, maybe afraid. — Dan Gutstein
Let me tell you: / God doesn’t give / you any favors / He doesn’t say / now you’ve seen / this bad thing / but tomorrow / you’ll see this good thing / and when you see it / you’ll be smiling — John Guzlowski
Tomorrow / I will be walking in the dawn / and smiling at the closeness / of my honey, the sky. — John Guzlowski
Words appear and I don’t question / why they are there. — John Guzlowski
You come back to the barn / where it all started / where God told you / not to eat the apple / and you find more apples. / And God comes in / And says what are you doing here? / I told you not to come. / And you say I’m just back. — John Guzlowski
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
—
As for you, look into your soul. Don’t be shy. Be honest. Be brutal. — Nassir Ghaemi
Awards and rewards aren’t given for great achievements, as society claims, but for small ones. — Nassir Ghaemi
Find your solace inside yourself, not outside. — Nassir Ghaemi
Freud never won a Nobel prize; they gave it to the fellow who introduced frontal lobotomy. — Nassir Ghaemi
It’s an unjust world. How will you live in it? — Nassir Ghaemi
Our ideals are mouthed and empty. — Nassir Ghaemi
Psychiatry is plagued deeply by its self-deception. — Nassir Ghaemi
Society punishes those who improve it. — Nassir Ghaemi
The DSM was and is a social construction, as I said, created by the profession for its own social purposes. — Nassir Ghaemi
There are no DSMs as diagnostic straightjackets in any medical specialty except psychiatry. — Nassir Ghaemi
When we make up our phenotypes for social, economic, and professional purposes why should genetics, biology, neuroimaging, pharmacology, and even psychotherapies correlate with it? — Nassir Ghaemi
—
Source: Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s letter to a medical student who is considering entering the field of psychiatry.
Dana Henry Martin 