Exit Wounds Quotes

How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.

& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed.

Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt

& so what–if my feathers are burning. I never asked for flight.

Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through.

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.

I didn't know the cost of entering a song - was to lose your way back.

Dear God, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here. Here. That's all I wanted to be. I promise.

My mother said I could be anything I wanted - but I chose to live.

Maybe we pray on our knees because god only listens when we’re this close to the devil.

Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.

use it to prove how the stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word

Don't we touch each other just to prove we're still here?

As if my finger, / tracing your collarbone / behind closed doors, / was enough / to erase myself.

Your father is only your father until one of you forgets. Like how the spine won't remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement. Ocean, are you listening? The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother's shadow falls.

Stupid boy, You can get lost in every book but you can never forget yourself the way god forgets his hands.

When they ask you where you’re from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst— into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.

You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most.

Everyone can forget us—as long as you remember.

Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky.

...teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season. Where apples thunder the earth with red hooves...

He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.

If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming.

what becomes of the shepherd / when the sheep are cannibals?

When our lips touched the day closed into a coffin. In the museum of the heart...

I met a man tonight.... maybe I shouldn't have, but he had the hands of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to.

Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.

If we ever make it to shore, he says, I will name our son after this water. I will learn to love a monster

I don’t know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt

In the body, where everything has a price, I was a beggar.

How / does anyone / stop / regret / without cutting / off his hands?

You're so quiet you're almost tomorrow.

I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning

Everything that burns, everything that rips me apart, I want to suffer with my body. I'd rather have a hundred wounds, whips, poisons - than this kind of suffering in the head, this phantom of suffering, which touches me softly and caresses me without ever really hurting.

That was one problem with dramatic exits: Sometimes they wound up making you look like a bubblehead.

Confetti green, how I want you green. Green despite the red despite the rest.

Silly me. I thought love was real& the body imaginary.

To love another man is to leave no one behind to forgive me.

If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth.

Even my name knelt down inside me, asking to be spared.

But only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart.

Cupid's arrow is straight and sharp, never misses its mark, but it leaves one hell of an exit wound.

Grandma said In the war they would grab a baby, a soldier at each ankle, and pull... Just like that. It's finally spring! Daffodils everywhere. Just like that.

Because the year is a distance we've traveled in circles

God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning her garden. My footsteps on the sidewalk were the smallest flights. Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here. Here. That's all I wanted to be. I promise.

He dies at the party where everyone laughs & all you want is to go into the kitchen & make seven omelets before burning down the house.

Note to self: If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn't be stuck down here.

Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt / the mind forgetting / the body's crime of living

You want to tell him it's okay that the night is also a grave we climb out of

& sometimes your hand is all you have to hold yourself to this world

don’t be afraid to be this luminous to be so bright so empty the bullets pass right through you thinking they have found the sky as you reach down press a hand to this blood -warm body like a word being nailed to its meaning & lives

It's more like the sound a doe makes when the arrowhead replaces the day with an answer to the rib's hollowed hum.

Woke up screaming with no sound. The room filling with a bluish water called dawn. Went to kiss grandma on the forehead just in case.

Why do all my books leave me empty-handed?

I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning. That if I looked through it, I would see the end of this sentence.

A pillaged village is a fine example of a perfect rhyme. He said that. He was white. Or maybe, I was just beside myself, next to him. Either way, I forgot his name by heart.

He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press into her — as the field shreds itself with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home out of  hip bones. O mother, O minutehand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season. Where apples thunder the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.

Note to self: If a guy tells you his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac, there's a very good chance he's a douchebag.

Memory erases into music

I enter my life the way words entered me— by falling through the silence of this wide open mouth

The body was made soft to keep us from loneliness.

I watched, through the keyhole, not the man showering, but the rain falling through him: guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders

you've come this far to be no one

We live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through.

The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother's shadow falls.

...I didn't know the cost of entering a song - was to lose your way back. So I entered. So I lost. I lost it all with my eyes wide open.

How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer—only to pick up the pieces?

Sometimes I feel like an ampersand. I wake up waiting for the crush. Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish. How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer—only to pick up the pieces?

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chain saw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. & so I learned—that a man in climax was the closest thing to surrender.

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft -- no matter how soft her skin is.

A mother's love neglects pride the way fire neglects the cries of what it burns.

You can get lost in every book but you'll never forget yourself.

Young enough to believe nothing.

My soul - born in a nameless place.

The spine won't remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement

4:37 a.m. How come depression makes me feel more alive?

If I close my eyes no one can hurt me.

When we left it, the city was still smoldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered by the bombed bakery. Broken baguettes. Crushed croissants. Gutted cars. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us.

When they ask you where you're from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst -- into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.

I didn’t know the cost of entering a song—was to lose your way back. So I entered. So I lost. I lost it all with my eyes wide open.

Because the difference between prayer & mercy is how you move the tongue.

Look how happy we are / to be no one

For in the body, where everything has a price, I was alive. I didn't know there was a better reason.

His voice - it filled me to the core like a skeleton. Even my name knelt down inside me, asking to be spared.

We had been sailing – but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight.

some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea

I push my face against a window the size of your palm where beyond the shore a grey dawn lifts the hem of your purple dress & I ignite.

My son, even tomorrow you will have today. Don't you know?

I want to leave no one behind. To keep& be kept. The way a field turns its secrets into peonies. The way light keeps its shadow by swallowing it.

Green waves surround this black rock where I sit turning bones to sonatas. Fingers blurred, I play what I know from listening to orchards unleash

Know that I never chose which way the seasons turned. That it was always October in my throat & you: every leaf refusing to rust

O minute hand, teach me/how to hold a man the way thirst/holds water. Let every river envy/ our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body/ like a season. Where apples thunder/ the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.

We made it, baby. We’re riding in the back of the black limousine. They have lined the road to shout our names. They have faith in your golden hair & pressed grey suit. They have a good citizen in me. I love my country. I pretend nothing is wrong. I pretend not to see the man & his blond daughter diving for cover, that you’re not saying my name & it’s not coming out like a slaughterhouse. I’m not Jackie O yet & there isn’t a hole in your head, a brief rainbow through a mist of rust. I love my country but who am I kidding? I’m holding your still-hot thoughts in, darling, my sweet, sweet Jack. I’m reaching across the trunk for a shard of your memory, the one where we kiss & the nation glitters. Your slumped back. Your hand letting go. You’re all over the seat now, deepening my fuchsia dress. But I’m a good citizen, surrounded by Jesus & ambulances. I love this country. The twisted faces. My country. The blue sky. Black limousine. My one white glove glistening pink—with all our American dreams.

Porcelain Heart I have grown into me I have become And I have swapped my pain for compassion My hurt for healing And my wounds for wisdom So I thank you To all those that demolished who I was So I could finally become And find the strongest parts of me Breaking the shell From the weaknesses of all those so cocooned in their unease

you are an exit wound the extra shot of tequila the tangled knot of hair that has to be cut out you are the cell phone ringing in a hushed theatre pebble wedged in the sole of a boot the bloody hangnail you are, just this once you are flip flops in a thunderstorm the boy’s lost erection a pen gone dry you are my father’s nightmare my mother’s mirage you are a manic high which is to say: you are a bad idea you are herpes despite the condom you are, I know better you are pieces of cork floating in the wine glass you are the morning after whose name I can’t remember still in my bed the hole in my rain boots vibrator with no batteries you are, shut up and kiss me you are naked wearing socks mascara bleeding down laughing cheeks you are the wrong guy buying me a drink you are the typo in an otherwise brilliant novel sweetalk into unprotected sex the married coworker my stubbed toe you are not new or uncommon not brilliant or beautiful you are a bad idea rock star in the back seat of a taxi burned popcorn top shelf, at half price you are everything I want you are a poem I cannot write a word I cannot translate you are an exit wound a name I cannot bring myself to say aloud

I wanted to share the risks the digger in Afghanistan took every day. Whenever I could I joined patrols ‘outside the wire’, walking the same dusty tracks and fields as the ordinary soldiers. I did everything in my power to keep them alive, I failed. In that year I lost ten soldiers under my command, killed in action. I personally identified the remains of each of them, sending them home to their families. More than sixty of my soldiers were wounded, some horribly.

The most terrifying part of battle was the exit from a trench—standing up and climbing out, knowing that the opposing force would at that moment unleash a fusillade that would continue until the offensive concluded, either with victory, meaning a few yards gained, or defeat, a few yards lost, but invariably with half one’s battalion dead, wounded, or missing. “I shall never forget the moment when we had to leave the shelter of the trenches,” wrote British private Ridley Sheldon, of combat at Helles, at the southwest tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. “It is indeed terrible, the first step you take—right into the face of the most deadly fire, and to realize that any moment you may be shot down; but if you are not hit, then you seem to gather courage. And when you see on either side of you men like yourself, it inspires you with a determination to press forward. Away we went over the parapet with fixed bayonets—one line of us like the wind. But it was absolute murder, for men fell like corn before the sickle.

But the engine started, eventually, after a bunch of popping and churning, and then it idled, wet and lumpy. The transmission was slower than the postal service. She rattled the selector into reverse, and all the mechanical parts inside called the roll and counted a quorum and set about deciding what to do. Which required a lengthy debate, apparently, because it was whole seconds before the truck lurched backward. She turned the wheel, which looked like hard work, and then she jammed the selector into a forward gear, and first of all the reversing committee wound up its business and approved its minutes and exited the room, and then the forward crew signed on and got comfortable, and a motion was tabled and seconded and discussed. More whole seconds passed, and then the truck slouched forward, slow and stuttering at first, before picking up its pace and rolling implacably toward the exit gate.

For instance, in one play the palace of Lord Hosokawa, in which was preserved the celebrated painting of Dharuma by Sesson, suddenly takes fire through the negligence of the samurai in charge. Resolved at all hazards to rescue the precious painting, he rushes into the burning building and seizes the kakemono, only to find all means of exit cut off by the flames. Thinking only of the picture, he slashes open his body with his sword, wraps his torn sleeve about the Sesson and plunges it into the gaping wound. The fire is at last extinguished. Among the smoking embers is found a half- consumed corpse, within which reposes the treasure uninjured by the fire. Horrible as such tales are, they illustrate the great value that we set upon a masterpiece, as well as the devotion of a trusted samurai.