Quotes from Laura Kasischke

A man holding a woman made of bad moods in his arms.

And this last second or two of dreaming in which your face returns to me completely. Not even needing to be, being so alive again to me.

Why not the Victorians and their sentimental grief-wreaths woven from a loved one's hair?

Its sweet bird's nest is full of pain in a distant place

My memory of your casual smile This memory, like a child's bit of sweet embroidery smuggled out of an asylum

Even my identity has been kept hidden from me. It is a child's ghost buried in mud. It is an old woman waving at me from a passing train.

There are daisies In the ruined garden, still blooming strangely

My eyes closed, hands open, Take it, take it . Then, every day wasted chasing it.

The day en route to darkness. The guillotine on the way to the neck.

Outside again, the river was invisible in the dark, but I could feel it swell and sink beneath the lawn as I ran back to the office, as if the earth were a membrane, a blister, filling up fast with water or blood, as if I were running across the back of a bruise, thinking it was the world.

The weatherman is always as honest as he is vague.

When it comes to nothingness, there is no cup.

Sometimes he'd write my mother's new name under his on a scrap of paper...then, the one that hurt her teeth to see, Mrs. Brock Connors-as if, by marrying, my father would be himself, and also become her.

It's twilight in the vineyard, and the red night rises from a troubled woman's glass of wine.

I'm demon-eyed, but I'm also filled with acceptance.

I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon- pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance- and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone.

That's right," Holly had said. "I bet there were, but I bet they didn't work as well as a plastic bag," and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets.

I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I'd never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them- something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light, and it was thought I could hold the life force itself in my hands.

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face.

Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known- their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth. A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long.

It's impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now. It's pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free.