Tell Me Quotes

“Like That"

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no
moon and no town anywhere
and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in
the ditch.
Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty
water
blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through
the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking,
without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s
shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV
showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves
slice through
the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can’t find
a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you’re alone in a glaring
diner
with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are
greasy
and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front
of my dress
and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just
beneath the surface,
their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s
driven
in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers;
and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles
drag
their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and
ducks.
Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes
open up,
when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the
pedal sinks to the floor,
while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another,
love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me
when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you
don’t believe
in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down
with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up
the radio
and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me,
as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“Intimacy

The woman in the cafe making my cappuccino — dark eyes, dyed
red hair,
sleeveless black turtleneck — used to be lovers with the man I’m
seeing now.
She doesn’t know me; we’re strangers, but still I can’t glance at her
casually, as I used to, before I knew. She stands at the machine,
sinking the nozzle
into a froth of milk, staring at nothing — I don’t know what she’s
thinking.
For all I know she might be remembering my lover, remembering
whatever happened
between them — he’s never told me, except to say that it wasn’t
important, and then
he changed the subject quickly, too quickly now that I think about
it; might he,
after all, have been lying, didn’t an expression of pain cross his
face for just
and instant? I can’t be sure. And really it was nothing, I tell myself;
there’s no reason for me to feel awkward standing here, or
complicitous,
as though there’s something significant between us.
She could be thinking of anything; why, now, do I have the sudden
suspicion
that she knows, that she feels me studying her, trying to imagine
them together?—
her lipstick’s dark red, darker than her hair — trying to see him
kissing her, turning her over in bed
the way he likes to have me. I wonder if maybe
there were things about her he preferred, things he misses now
that we’re together;
sometimes, when he and I are making love, there are moments
I’m overwhelmed by sadness, and though I’m there with him I
can’t help thinking
of my ex-husband’s hands, which I especially loved, and I want to
go back
to that old intimacy, which often felt like the purest happiness
I’d ever known, or would. But all that’s over; and besides, weren’t
there other lovers
who left no trace? When I see them now, I can barely remember
what they looked like undressed, or how it felt to have them
inside me. So what is it I feel as she pours the black espresso into
the milk,
and pushes the cup toward me, and I give her the money,
and our eyes meet for just a second, and our fingers touch?”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“Today I want
to resolve nothing.
I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold
blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it..”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“You stand there firing until the gun feels
light again, and innocent. And then you reload.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“Glass"

In every bar there’s someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed
by whatever he’s seeing in the glass in front of him,
a glass that looks ordinary, with something clear or dark
inside it, something partially drunk but never completely gone.
Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing,
the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness
opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless
while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him.
And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles,
the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue
nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining,
toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker
signals for another. Now the relatives are floating up
with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt
and a little laughter, too, and even beauty—some afternoon from childhood,
a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few flurries of snow
that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole
world’s gone white and quiet, until there’s hardly a world
at all, no traffic, no money or butchery or sex,
just a blessed peace that seems final but isn’t. And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker’s own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,
the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?
Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything
but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people
they’ve managed to gather around them against the uncertainty,
against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar
with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well?
Forget that loser. Just tell me who’s buying, who’s paying;
Christ but I’m thirsty, and I want to tell you something,
come close I want to whisper it, to pour
the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you,
listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober,
while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass,
while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay,
give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop,
I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up.

Kim Addonizio, Tell Me (BOA Editions Ltd.; First Edition (July 1, 2000)”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“Good-bye to how you’d curl away in sleep,
one hand to your forehead, doing the hard work
of dreaming...

good-bye to your drunkenness,
which I admit I liked because of how
you’d cry sometimes, or follow me from room
to room, naked, dripping from a bath,
able to say what you couldn’t, sober.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“I explained already about suffering

and about each one of you, destined to be isolate and alone
because writing is lonely work”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“Then someone finished a story, someone else paused to think of the right word, and a silence opened and spread through the brightly lit room.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“I’m alone all day.
In the afternoon, thunder...
the sky
stitches together the loose scraps of dark.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“And you
sit listening, and nodding, like those toys
I’ve seen, their heads on springs. It’s too
ridiculous, this ordering the noise
the past makes into music. What’s it for?
Time’s up. You’re in the house. I’m through the door.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“If God is good, how is it that the weed of evil
takes root everywhere, and what is there to keep us
from murdering each other in despair?”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring
and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“Sometimes it's enough just to say their names like a rosary, ordinary names linked by nothing but the fact that they belong to men who loved you.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“Onset"

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers,
bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of
is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.
Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing.
And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately
I can’t stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers
of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug
beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs,
even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me,
the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other
like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything,
my hands and eyes, yours; doesn’t that frighten you sometimes, remembering
the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you,
beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs,
don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own;
I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring
and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me