becoming & unbecoming

“What is a witch but a woman men cannot quiet?”

“In my memory, it doesn’t end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.”

I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.

“But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain,”

“I know this story / I know that I go towards what I don’t know / Perhaps I’m still alive somewhere.”

Sometimes, when I see you in a crowd, and I pretend not to, I remember the way you

“People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

“Sunday evening, winter morning, November dusk. We belong where love finds us.”

I realize that being a woman is a lot like being a planet—I can’t decide what my gravity attracts. I am as helpless as I am powerful. I am very powerful.

“No matter who you are, all you are ever doing is leaving or being left or acting as the impetus to leave. Again, & again, & again. This is every story. This is the trinity.”

In a high-school history class, white children raised their eyebrows when I raised my voice.