“Now I know all city parks are the same. Hyde Park. The bluffs above Santa Monica. The Tuileries. Just paths beneath trees where people walk in varying states of heartbreak. Staggering between divorces and biopsies. And at the edge, one final row of lavender azaleas.”

“The place between actual seasons is filled with tiny roses in transition. There are murders and amputations in the garden. There are choirs on the sandy floors beneath oceans.”

“All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.”

“They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?”

“Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.”

“The night stayed outside. She was surprised. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Instead, blue things flew in, pieces of glass or tin, or necklaces of blue diamond, perhaps. The air was the blue of a pool when there are shadows, when clouds cross the turquoise surface, when you suspect something contagious is leaking, something camouflaged and disrupted. There is only this infected blue enormity, elongating defiantly. The blue that knows you and where you live and it's never going to forget.”

“I feel you're far away,” the man might say. He is observing you, calculating, forming equations he may take to a representative of the patriarchy, such as a doctor, a lawyer, or military official. He is considering physical incarceration and/or biochemical imprisonments such as occur with antidepressants. He is dangerous.This is a juncture where you may smile. This is optional. You might allow your lips to form the ambiguous seductive shape of slow regret. Or let your mouth fill with too much night, incinerated maple leaves and fox teeth. What you mean is, not yet.”