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seized with the sudden urge to backflip through time and attempt a citizen’s arrest.
Russians are trying to blow up capitalism and you’re surrounded by dolphins who know how to spy
My mother, not wishing to let Ireland down, now turned her attention to the all-consuming art of procreation.
They are never happier than when they are scissoring big purple grapes out of felt and gluing them onto other felt.
an enigma in fine elfin shoes wandering through private gardens, his eyes among the bushes like unblinking black roses.)
the color of bad weather,
got so caught up in their studies of ancient Greece that they murdered a farmer while worshipping the grape-god in the countryside.
these were essentially poems a cartoon roadrunner would write,
It might strike you as irresponsible, to fall in love on the strength of one image about chickens bursting, but this was a different time.
It was 2002, and back then, everyone believed the internet was a country where murderers lived.
“I did not raise you to murder,” said my mother.
What was he, a little girl? A miniature woman? A babylady?
Perhaps it was the same instinct that had once caused me to throw a lit firecracker directly at the face of my sister Mary while yelling, “GET OUT OF THE WAY!”
If I wanted to frighten off a chat-room bastard who was trying to be monogamous with my daughter, what better way than to lure him into my rec room and put together the world’s most deadly jigsaw puzzle right in front of his face?
I was never sure whether these long stretches of refusing to draw a paycheck were a mark of my entitlement or the only act of rebellion available to me.
Her husband was a retired general who was a convicted Latin Mass goer,
The general was the source of numerous startling quotes. He had once frightened Jason badly by placing an iron hand on his shoulder and whispering to him, “I’ve never felt closer to God than I do in the churches of Poland.”
“Well, I don’t need to sleep anymore, so if you need me to do it, just let me know and I’ll be down here in ten hours. Nine. Eight hours.” Passing a darkened shape teetering on the edge of a curb, she gasped suddenly, “Oh my god, it’s a double amputee!” “Mom, no. It’s a trash can.” “Oh.”
She smells so good that the horse thinks he is a man. He wants to conceive a pearl with her and watch her give birth to it in the sea.
We had always come from elsewhere, and in the end we would always go there again. That was our real hometown.
We treasure these sayings of my father’s, we store them up and polish them.
a childish roundness to his arms and legs that suggests he is made of endless breadsticks.
He seems overjoyed to see me. Has he forgotten what I’m like?
The house is unfamiliar, yet somehow it contains all my childhood houses.
I have been pretending to be a grown-up this whole time.
There is more gravity in this room than there is anywhere else on the planet, so much that I can hardly step outside it.
I lie on the bed and feel myself gently going out of print.
trying to guess whether I need to go to a restaurant or not.
“But do you need a hamburger,” she whispers.
Make the guitar falsely confess to murder
I love him instantly and beyond all reason, in the way you love people you’re going to be able to write about.
“Yes,” I say gravely, signaling Jason across the room to write that quote down word for word.
“And the pope wears what a baby would wear to the prom.”)
he mocks, with such perfect assurance of my agreement that I wonder if he has ever really looked at me, or heard a single word I’ve ever said.
The seminarian calls women the “tabernacle of life.” The tabernacle, if you do not know, is an ornamental box that is largely important for what it holds. It is shut up and locked when the men go away, so the consecrated elements inside cannot be stolen.
A hundred kind faces are turned toward us with respect and admiration; it’s a living nightmare.
an empathy for his body I could not possibly feel for his mind.
all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we.
an old familiar wildness flutters up my chest and into my throat, sending feathers and flames into my voice box until I cannot speak, that same phoenix heat that still rises up in me no matter how many times I force it down.
A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.
There is something pleasant about this, almost like having a real job again.
How could I be sure I was telling the truth about myself when he claimed to know me better than I did?
That was the bargain, and I shook my own hand on it. I would write forever, but not about myself and not about what happened, and never about my most profound and deforming secrets—that
starters. But how long can you outrun your subject, when your subject is your own life?
Everyone gets a window.
It appears to be fourteen in the morning, but that’s not a real time.
I’m aware I’m making the low continuous moaning noise of a fearful cow, but I can’t seem to stop. This is the worst story I’ve ever heard.
all we can find is a classic rock station playing “Imagine,” which is my mother’s enemy in song form. “Imagine there’s no heaven?” I don’t think so. “Imagine there’s no countries?” Then we would be France.
John Lennon was truly a wonderful lyricist before he was murdered.”
She understands Pun Lightning, that jolt of connection when the language turns itself inside out, when two words suddenly profess they’re related to each other, or wish to be married, or were in league all along.
