The Dogs I Have Kissed Quotes

“I Swear Somewhere This Works

In a parallel universe or another world
or a different life,

we sit across from each other

at the kitchen table

and go over
the grocery
list.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Sometimes I think I resented you so much it felt like love.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I’m sorry that I am back and forth, push and pull
instead of effortless simplicity.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“My hands are still shaking from
nights spent not knowing
how to want you.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Like one moment I am whole,   but then I hear your voice on the phone   and I swear to god three blocks away from here they can smell smoke.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I will greet you with a mouth full of barbed wire until you learn to stop coming after me with your hands.
”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“For Brittanie

There will always be men
who have fishhooks for fingers.
There will always be women
with wet, sharp mouths.
It is okay to get caught up in them.

It is not okay to drown.

Don’t you ever let another human
being tear you apart.
Remember that you have claws
and teeth, too.

Remember that you are better off
whole.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“i loved her more than i loved you and i’m sorry that you knew it.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“can we say goodbye again? i miss the way you rip me open.   i”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I do not tell her that sometimes it feels like compromising yourself is part of growing up.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Hurt me once: shame on me. Hurt me twice: shame on me. Hurt me three times: shame on me but fuck you. Hurt me four times and we’ll get severed-head biblical.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“And now that I am older, I don’t give a damn about sin. I will be the first to cast one.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“My girl always talks about herself like she’s a graveyard,   a place for other people to come and bury what they’ve lost. As much as I want to tell her that she’s wrong, I still find myself crouching in her earth with flowers I’ve brought for someone else.   My”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Girl like a garden you never volunteered to tend. Dirt all tracked into your front hall.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I don’t know how to be angry with you, but my pride demands I figure it out. It is so easy to make monsters out of the people I have loved, to pick up a pen and write “THIS IS YOUR FAULT” until the page is full. It is easier to make myself the monster, to snap and bite and run and hide. It is easy to bare my teeth. It is harder to be honest. Nobody here has claws or sharp teeth.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“She writes a lot about religion for someone who looks out of place in a pew.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I’d suck salt off your fingers
 like a fucking animal.
”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Don’t you ever let another human being tear you apart. Remember that you have claws and teeth, too.   Remember that you are better off   whole.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“The poet can’t stand the quiet. She can’t stand the buzzing in her head. The murmur of memory. The poet picks up a book of poetry. It is not her writing but it reads the same way. It is not her story but the ending is similar enough to pass. The poet tries to read a verse out loud and only tastes blood in her mouth. The poet worries she is writing the same poem over and over. No matter what words she puts down, it comes out with a bite.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I know that I am lucky to be alive at the same time as you. I know that finding you was a cosmic needle in a haystack, a joke of Internet cables and telephone wires. But I also know that you are more afraid of opening up than losing me.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I keep rewriting this poem. I want it to make more sense. I want it to be less honest.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I don’t know what it is in me that yearns to be the lifeboat that people throw themselves at when they are drowning.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Tell me that you’ve spent a great deal of time
gazing at stars, thinking that sometimes things look
better farther apart. That constellations are beautiful
only because we have the space to connect the dots.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I taste like salt. You taste like toothpaste. There’s no poetry in that. It’s just life.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“And you might curse the one who teaches you what it feels like to cry at the bottom of the shower in the middle of the night, but it is important to learn how to get back up on your own feet and let the wolf in your throat howl at the moon once in a while.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“it’s hard to tell the difference between wanting to die and just wanting to sink for a while.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“My brother talks about car accidents the same way I talk about family. I don’t know when he learned to forgive. I don’t remember teaching him that. I don’t remember learning it myself. His life’s ambition is to be the man my father never was: to step up to the plate, to grow into a firefighter’s uniform or ride shotgun in an ambulance. I am still stuck on the bathroom floor with my resentment.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“And I never wanted to tell anyone but the poems   because I was the one with the pink garter belt and the thigh-high stockings. And I was the one with the little black dress.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“for S.—   I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters, but I always seem to lay us out bare. Sorry for the poems.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“And that’s it.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed