She serves me a piece of it a few minutes out of the oven. A little steam rises from the slits on top. Sugar and spice - cinnamon - burned into the crust. But she's wearing these dark glasses in the kitchen at ten o'clock in the morning - everything nice - as she watches me break off a piece, bring it to my mouth, and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen, in winter. I fork the pie in and tell myself to stay out of it. She says she loves him. No way could it be worse.

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it