Wrong Side of a Fistfight Quotes

“You are a language I am no longer fluent in
but still remember how to read.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“I am carving myself into a shape
that no one will recognize
because it is better being the marble
than the monster.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“Your ribcage never meant to hurt you.
Your windpipe doesn’t know how to be pretty,
but she knows how to howl—
and here, I’d like to take a moment
to submit a formal apology to my soft parts
because they kept me warm
when I was trying to freeze to death,
and I hated them for it. An apology
for a starvation that went deeper than my skin.
One for the strongest skeleton I will ever own
and how I kept using the word girl against it.
Or how I turned words like beautiful into shapes
I could contort myself into. I didn’t mean
to compare myself to faces I can’t have.
Or spend years trying to carve myself,
like Michelangelo’s angels, from the marble—
forgetting what it is to be skin instead of stone.
I let myself be afraid. I was taught to be.
When you learn you are only as good
as your beauty routine, you forget
how to define yourself by anything else.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“This is a story of survival.
It is your story,
even when you feel like that word
does not belong to you.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“But who buries the hatchet
and who buries the bodies?
And who says they’re not
the same thing these days?”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“I was a wolf, and they dressed me
in sheepskin”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“Listen, in a few hours
our little world will
turn herself right-side-up-again,
and you will forget about
all the ways this lonely night
sang you watered-down blues and
your hands will start to make sense again.

You think you've seen every ugly corner
of this whole rotten world, but listen:
There is an infinite number
of things we don't know and,
statistically speaking,
at least half of them
are probably
very, very, beautiful.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“First,
quit picking old wounds
and going for walks in the aches
and pains you already made it through -
you call it healing, but
it sounds like a good way
to take a haunting home with you.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“I’d like to take a moment
to submit a formal apology to my soft parts
because they kept me warm
when I was trying to freeze to death,
and I hated them for it”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight

“Being a Poet"

People must think
that being a poet is very slow,
sincere and quiet.
But at night
the inside of my chest is
so loud,
sometimes I stay awake for days,
trying to out-howl
the hunger
inside it.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight