Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

Everything I write, I read out loud. It has to sound a certain way. It has to look a certain way on the page.

In all your getting, get understanding.

I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect was on the outside of understanding that. I think that's what's so destructive.

No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.