Drum Machine Quotes

“Would it be enough to rock on a stormless sea with each our separate memories tuned to the state of the sinking sun?”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“It was as if someone had left
the bird there
as a kind of telegram
of feathers, oily feathers
that looked like they’d struggled,
shuttered a little before letting go
into flight
forever.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“there’s no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“Dear Anonymous, I've got a secret
I know you can keep it
because you don't really exist....

This is what shapes you,
this is what makes you
as authentic as you are fake.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“I tell you once and for all—
in front of the angel pictures
on the wall, that I am not a host
to load-bearing ghosts or heady
entities, and if I was ever holy, I have fallen far
into the dense atmosphere of the living.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“How long before the eaves gave way
to the sky, or the bathroom floor
was jack-hammered to bone,
while the trees outside were left
to redirect the wind?

How quickly the den must have become more kitchen
and bedrooms lost their privacy. I see the books
we’d packed up and moved years ago

under a pile of fresh rubble, still sending off dust—
titles stunned to a babble
in gold leaf.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seeds
for the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“Even the bees I'd swear were sent to protect us in the delicate business of hives and honey are stung to silence by the news that something winged has lost its flight.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“...you hold a poem
that functions half as personal
note and half as telescope
to the heights
awaiting us all.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed
at the puckered hem of granite
gray sweatpants, and she also knew
I was watching from the open door
of the B train—watching her pose
in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“Dear Anonymous, I've got a secret I know you can keep it because you don't really exist....This is what shapes you, this is what makes you
as authentic as you are
fake.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“...we’re not even really hiking,
more like meandering in cinematic light.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“There’s a pressure at all hours of the day only a poem can assuage.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“If in poetry court she was called
to testify on matters where
I was condemned to imprisonment: parking my ego
at a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme,
dealing stanzaics to children, shooting
off my mouth, getting cute, for even this
latest attempt at verse, she would tell the whole truth,
she would admit from the pit
of her unsung brilliance,
from all of the paintings and poems
she herself has been making
and storing in the vast empire of her
singing soul, your Honor, my daughter is guilty
of plagiarizing my cells.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“Sure, I watched the workmen come and lower large pieces of rotten sheetrock and lift new clean panels on a pulley
from that same window months ago, and I could have written then, but I must have sensed her coming, the smoker, so I waited.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of light, and even Stephen Hawking's mind would miss it?”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine

“There used to be trees in the untended park below the old married couple of windows in my living room.”
― Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine