In a dream you are never eighty.

A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.

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.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.

We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!

women are born twice.