“I wondered stony afternoons owning all their vastness.”

“To know the difference,you must run this mountain without pause. In the evening or the afternoon, you must cross the first fields wakingto your footsteps, stormwashed at the foothills.In the evening or the afternoon, in the closing of a shadowline, you must read aloud the reddened last words of this canyon's leaves to the trees that clap their hands.”

“The RiderA boy told meif he roller-skated fast enoughhis loneliness couldn't catch up to him,the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion.What I wonder tonightpedaling hard down King William Streetis if it translates to bicycles.A victory! To leave your lonelinesspanting behind you on some street cornerwhile you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,pink petals that have never felt loneliness,no matter how slowly they fell.”

“I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world.”

“I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body”

“Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better.”

“Making a FistFor the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the carwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin."How do you know if you are going to die?"I begged my mother.We had been traveling for days.With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."Years later I smile to think of that journey,the borders we must cross separately,stamped with our unanswerable woes.I who did not die, who am still living,still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,clenching and opening one small hand.”