Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.

All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious