Patriarchy taught me how to take a punch better than I could take a compliment.
I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity; our lovers’ necks are so soft.
I met a woman and we were lying in her bed, about to kiss for the very first time. Just before our lips touched she jumped up and ran to her closet and grabbed a stethoscope. She came back to the bed, put the earpieces in my ears, slipped the disc down her shirt onto her heart, and whispered, ‘I want you to listen to my heart speed up when you kiss me.’ And I kissed her, and I listened to her heart beat faster and faster and faster.
Your life each time airport security screams, Pink or blue? Pink or blue? trying to figure out which machine setting to run you through. Choosing your life and how that made you into someone who now finds it easy to explain your gender by saying you are happiest on the road, when you’re not here or there, but in-between, that yellow line coming down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam.
I know some people build their safety with walls. Me, I’m into demolition – whatever tears the walls down. I have a hard time kissing without that kind of dust in the air. I see a wrecking ball and see a wedding ring, think, “Look at the size of that stone.
There was a typo in the book. The line read, “I want to merry you.” I thought, “That’s exactly what I want to do: merry somebody.
Maybe sometimes you get tired of seeing people’s humanity in moments where they’re outright refusing to show us their humanity.
I’m not a pessimist, I’m just thinking about how she said, ‘I love you,’ while I was having a panic attack and how that means she’s probably a liar and how she’ll likely cut off her own nose to prove me wrong and how then she won’t smell my pheromones and how then we’ll both die of lesbian bed death.
Remember the time when we saw two boys kissing on the street in Kansas and we both broken down crying, ‘cause it was Kansas, and you said, ‘What are the chances of seeing anything but corn in Kansas?!’ We were born again that day. I cut your cord and you cut mine.
The present is far from gift-wrapped.
The closest I might ever come to war is the turning of my head. Apathy is intimate, like singing a lullaby to a grenade, then drinking yourself to sleep while it sneaks out the window to explode a boy.
Do you know science just proved an atom can exist in two places at the same time? No one is ever only at the scene of their crimes. Each of us is always also somewhere holy.
I feel that sometimes when I’m writing poems – like they don’t yet fit. Do you ever feel like the best of you is something you’re still hoping to grow into?
I know you take issue with me comparing Trump to Hitler. One, a failed painter who blamed the Jewish people for the beauty his heart was too ugly to make. The other, a con artist with enough failed humanity to eye our dying planet and focus on Miss America’s weight.
The worst thing that ever happened to me was not the worst thing that ever happened to me. Hating myself for it was.
When all the good in you starts arguing with all the bad in you about who you really are, never let the bad in you make the better case.
Come, love, make me better than I was. Come teach me a kinder way to say my own name.
It’s true what they say about the gays being so fashionable – our ghosts never go out of style, even life is like funeral practice: half of us already dead to our families before we die, half of us still on our knees trying to crawl into the family photo.
I think the hardest people in the world to forgive are the people we once were, the people we are trying desperately to not stir into the recipe of who we are now.
I hear almost every argument is a race for the victim spot.
Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?