How not to imagine the tumors ripening beneath his skin, flesh I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips, pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights so hard I thought I could enter him, open his back at the spine like a door or a curtain and slip in like a small fish between his ribs, nudge the coral of his brains with my lips, brushing over the blue coil of his bowels with the fluted silk of my tail.

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

And I saw it didn't matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty of the Iranian attendant, the thickening clouds--nothing was mine. And I understood finally, after a semester of philosophy, a thousand books of poetry, after death and childbirth and the startled cries of men who called out my name as they entered me, I finally believed I was alone, felt it in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo like a thin bell.

I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.