the singing knives

I don't remember his face but every man who touched me made one gesture that never quite came to an end; I can feel the forearm of one across my belly as he swam up behind me in a lake, the rough kiss of another on my palm, and sometimes I think that there might be some device like the X-ray machines they use to look at your feet in the shoe stores that would make these indelible impressions visible, a series of marks, the opposite of bruises, across and around me, and I went through the world dressed in those experiences, we all do.

Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

“At this moment in our culture, where there is so much cliché and so many soundbites, and where our writing is corrected even as we’re making a sentence by a computer that’s using algorithms to move us toward the most conventional possibilities and sentence formation, and where our lexicon is also being diminished by the spaces we have to write in, like how many characters in a tweet, one of the things poetry offers is a more expansive repertoire of language for the expression of the nuances of our feelings and thinking.”