the singing knives

“Someday we will have to agree over violence and its long history. Its way of standing between us and the pure beauty of sky and sea, which we have forgotten to such a degree that our terrorized eyes can no longer make out, through the flood of thoughts, a horizon for our thoughts to move on.”

“He slid the stiff blade up to my ear: Oh, fear, this should have been thirst, a cheapening act. But I lacked, as usual, the crucial disbelief. Sticky, cold, a billfold wet in my mouth, wrists bound by his belt, I felt like the boy in a briny night pool, he who found the drowned body, yet still somehow swam with an unknown joy. That boy.”

“Be the right kind of hungry.”

“what will you sing if hunger abides in your blood? there is a name for the animal grief makes of us—”

“i know the tongue she speaks— grief is a kind of language you can touch.”