like our parents always told us not to like firefighters warn against we're playing games and making the rules up as we go we're matching warmth to warmth starting fires burning wishes into our skin we're hidden holding forbidden lights we're children whose fathers have never taught never touch but we're finding these new flames we smother at the sound of footsteps.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.

I want to be someone making music/with my coming.