Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

This is my favorite part. It starts and ends here. The pebbles shine, the plan worked, Hansel Triumphant. Lesson number one: be sneaky and have a plan. But the stupid boy goes back, makes the rest of the story postscript and aftermath. He shouldn’t have gone back. And this is the second lesson I took from the story: when someone is trying to ditch you, kill you, never go back.

For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

Everything affects my poetry, every day something happens that changes me forever. I’m susceptible and plastic, thin-skinned and moody.