“Death comes to me again, a girlin a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.It’s not so terrible she tells me,not like you think, all darknessand silence. There are windchimesand the smell of lemons, some daysit rains, but more often the air is dryand sweet. I sit beneath the staircasebuilt from hair and bone and listento the voices of the living. I like it,she says, shaking the dust from her hair,especially when they fight, and when they sing.”

“Moon In the WindowI wish I could say I was the kind of childwho watched the moon from her window,would turn toward it and wonder.I never wondered. I read. Dark signsthat crawled toward the edge of the page.It took me years to grow a heartfrom paper and glue. All I had was a flashlight, bright as the moon,a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.”

“How not to imagine the tumorsripening beneath his skin, fleshI have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,pressed my belly and breasts against, some nightsso hard I thought I could enter him, openhis back at the spine like a door or a curtainand slip in like a small fish between his ribs,nudge the coral of his brains with my lips,brushing over the blue coil of his bowelswith the fluted silk of my tail.”

“Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.”

“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”

“Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.”

“A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.”