“Out there people are working and arguing and laughing, living their beautiful, terrible lives, falling in love and having babies and being bored out of their skulls and feeling depressed, then being consoled by some little thing like watching the patterns the light makes through the leaves of trees, casting shadows on the sidewalks.I remember the line from that poem now.Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”

“You Don't Know What Love IsBut you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How towash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she's headed, you know she'll wake up with an ache she can't locate and no moneyand a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throatlike an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.”

“And finallythe glass that contains and spills this stuff continuallywhile the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathersup empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger towardthe bathroom, some man or woman or even lostangel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?”

“Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.”

“Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.”

“What Do Women Want?" I want a red dress.I want it flimsy and cheap,I want it too tight, I want to wear ituntil someone tears it off me.I want it sleeveless and backless,this dress, so no one has to guesswhat's underneath. I want to walk downthe street past Thrifty's and the hardware storewith all those keys glittering in the window,past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-olddonuts in their café, past the Guerra brothersslinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.I want to walk like I'm the onlywoman on earth and I can have my pick.I want that red dress bad.I want it to confirmyour worst fears about me,to show you how little I care about youor anything except whatI want. When I find it, I'll pull that garmentfrom its hanger like I'm choosing a bodyto carry me into this world, throughthe birth-cries and the love-cries too,and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,it'll be the goddamneddress they bury me in.”

“Love me like a wrong turn on a bad roadlate at night.”