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“I am not a lady
I live in an elevator
in a big department store America.
“Your floor, lady?”
“I don't have a floor,
I live in the elevator.”
“You can't just live in an elevator.”
They all say that
except for the man from Time magazine
who acted very cool.
We stop and let people into
dresses, better dresses, beauty,
and on the top floor,
home furnishings and then
the credit office, suddenly stark
and no nonsense this is it.
At each floor I look out
at the ladies quietly becoming
ladies and I say “huh”
reflectively.
My hair is long and wild
full of little twigs and cockleburrs.
I visit the floors only for water.
I make my own food
from the berries and frightened rabbits—
I pray forgive me brother as I eat—
that grow wild in the elevator.
Once every three months,
solstice and equinox,
a cop comes and clubs me a little.
The man from Time says
I articulate my generation something
wobble squeegy squiggle pop pop
Yesterday pausing at childrens
I saw another lady
take off all her clothes
and go to live in #7.
We are waiting to fill
all thirteen.”
― Jean Tepperman, Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Cubitum eamus?"
"What?"
"Nothing.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe