“Listen he says to the way I’ll never kiss you again. Whistle of a train breaking from the floorboards, music of wet cement, sweet Black and Mild through a vent, and this is not the end, but it is almost the end. The something still to be done. The pruning of shrubs. Do anything. Please.”— Michelle Dominique Burk, narrativemagazine.com
“On nights when you feel like your mouth Is filled with scar tissue when your fists are heavier than your clay heart, remember the broken that does not need replacement remember the lungs that pound air in a body too tired to kiss the sun tell yourself you are still working on it say healing, say tak…”— Tammy Danan, thoughtcatalog.com
“Hold that white flag close to your heart And pluck the orange from the sun – it is setting Let it set on your palms Let your shaking bones beat like djembe drums Let your surrender fall to the ground So it can hold this tiny blue earth together. There is an ocean inside of you and Its waves come in…”— Tammy Danan, thoughtcatalog.com
“I see smoke each time I look in the mirror Perhaps this is God’s way of keeping me safe He knows I’m tired of seeing dead birds in rusting cages. Last night, I called the wind and asked How she taught the dove to fly ‘the sky is a map if you know how to look’ She said. And I looked at my skin, marke…”— Tammy Danan, thoughtcatalog.com
“most people fear the fire there’s the burning the suffocation the losing who wouldn’t be afraid of the fire? You. when you reach that dark alley and decided to make a left when you skipped morning coffee because you’ve had too much wine when you felt so heavy-hearted but scuffled upon approaching yo…”— Tammy Danan, thoughtcatalog.com
“Every sentence is a wispy net, capturing a few flecks of meaning. The sun shines without vocabulary. The salmon has no name for the urge that drives it upstream. The newborn groping for the nipple knows hunger long before it knows a single word. Even with an entire dictionary in one's head, one even…”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“What memory is made of I cannot say; my body, at least, is made of atoms on loan from the earth. How implausible, that these atoms should have gathered to form this I, this envelope of skin that walks about.”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“Then I withdrew my hand and she smoothed her skirt, neither of us risking a word, and we teetered there for a hundred heartbeats on those swaying branches, shaken by inner as well as outer winds.”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“What does it taste like? he asks me, his breath a sweet impermanence. Tell me what it tastes like.”— J. Scott Browniee, narrativemagazine.com