My mouth blooms like a cut.

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.

It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.

the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

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.