34. What is the shape of your body? Angel: an intense tension in her left shoulder blade, as if she is growing a wing. I know that she experiences her mouth as a smeared gesture: paint, fingers. In words, then? Sometimes she feels that her body is open to the air. There is nothing that separates her from herself. She does not exist. She can’t exist. If she existed, her wholeness would be irrelevant; a lit match. She’s watching it burn. It burns like cream. As soon as she writes these things, she knows they are not true. Angel. The only word she knows in Spanish. Smoky gelatin. Everything is different now.

“Plath had dared to do something quite different. She had dared to write hate poems, the one thing I had never dared to write. I’d always been afraid, ever in my life, to express anger.”

reading list: depression

“you are a kind of terrible part of me — I do not know how to disorganize myself. I have grown into this. No way back. No way at all.”

“I am the Goddess no one wants but all must seek. I am the Mother of all loss.”

“Her stare, that of an animal, met my own animal stare.”