I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

When they first kiss, there on the beach, they will kneel at the edge of the Pacific and say a prayer of thanks, sending all the stories of love inside them out in a fleet of bottles all across the oceans of the world.

Pulling heads off Barbies, sticking them on the TV antenna and ruining the reception. But thats how witch babies are.

My mother said, "kiss him, darling, it's easy so natural" and I thought to myself, not with lips of stone, dear mother, not with lips of stone

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.

Beauty loved him more than anything, her Beast boy, but, secretly, sometimes, she wished he would have remained a Beast.

At least the girls in stories were alive before they died.