Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have...
My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.
I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
Today life opened inside me like an egg...
One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is “Whatever you do, don’t be boring.”
Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
It would be pleasant to be drunk.
Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.
Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.
Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus and limes.
Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.
O fallen angel, the companion within me, whisper something holy before you pinch me into the grave.
My mouth blooms like a cut.
There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all’s certain and good, that the marriage won’t end.
I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.