Quotes from Richard Siken

Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

names of fire and flight and snow

Names called out across the water, names I called you behind your back, sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable

A man found a door and hung it on the wall.

You do the math, you expect the trouble.

the names of flowers that open only once, shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops, or muffled by rooftops, or whispered in sleep, or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.

To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself.

There is no way to make this story interesting.

I've been in your body, baby, and it was paradise.

The waters of the dead, a clear road, every lover in the form of stars, the road blocked.

names of places we've been together, names of people we'd be together.

All night I stretched my arms across him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone Please keep him safe. Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed to pieces.

It could have been so beautiful . . . how it was and how it will be, memory and fantasy

because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.

Your name like two X's like punched-in eyes, like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter, your name with two X's to mark the spots, to hold the place, to keep the treasure from becoming ever lost.

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can't light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it's only fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his looking. Difficult thing, to be scrutinized so long. I find parts that overlap with mine and light them up in clays and creams, yellow music singing pink, the flicker of his mouth a purple rust.

I'll be right here. I'm waiting.

I was away, I don't know where, lying on the floor, pretending I was dead.

The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, sees you as a piece of real estate, just another fallow field lying underneath him like a sacrifice.

Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom to kingdom through the wilderness, where you learn things, where you're left to your own devices.

There's a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place— well then, game over.

Everyone in this room got here somehow and everyone in this room will have to leave.

Names of heat and names of light, names of collision in the dark

pressing against you until he fits, until he's made a place for himself inside you.