“I wonder what violence will / find me today. A deer’s teeth.”

"Pearl had grown up knowing and not knowing her mother. It happened sometimes: a child raised by an aunt, by grandparents. The mother hovering at the borders of their lives."

If one of the things we get from engaging with other beings is some sort of reflectivity, reflexivity, this past year I have been alienated not only from other people, but from myself. Much of the life that I have been able to encounter, not through a screen at least, for the past year, has been non-human.

“What’s missing, what isn’t there, creates the poetry.”

when I breathe in I remember my mother too clearly and I lift the pencil
drawing attention to the line begins mark-making in this context

Certain writers assault you with their intelligence, not as, or only as, a performance, but rather out of necessity: they simply cannot stop thinking. Humor has long been the balm of metacognition, laughter a scaffolding over the abyss.