One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

The body is a damn hard thing to kill.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.