Quotes from Richard Siken

You said Will you love me even more when I'm dead?

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not

We carve up the world/and crown it with numbers—lumens, ounces,/decibels. All these things and what to do with them.

I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth.

his skin barely keeping him inside. I wanted to take him home

Accidents never happen when the room is empty.

So , I said, now that we have our dead, what are we going to do with them?

Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. — Richard Siken, from "The Language of the Birds," War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015)

We can do anything. It's not because our hearts are large, they're not, it's what we struggle with

the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

here is the fear of the other thing, the relentless thing, your body drowning in gravity. This is the in-between, the waiting that happens in the space between

I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do.

I put on my best shirt because the painting looked so bad. Color bleeds, so make it work for you. Gravity pulls, so make it work for you. Rubbing your feet at night or clutching your stomach in the morning. It was illegible - no single line of sight, too many angles of approach, smoke in the distance. It made no sense. When you have nothing to say, set something on fire. A blurry landscape is useless.

saying farewell to flesh, farewell to everything caught underfoot and flattened.

Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing, names that no one's ever able to figure out.

Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other. We know who our enemies are. We know.

We've been driving all night. We've been driving a long time. We want to stop. We can't.

I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything, couldn't do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.

Imagine this: You're pulling the car over. Somebody's waiting. You're going to die in your best friend's arms. And you play along because it's funny, because it's written down, you've memorized it, it's all you know. I say the phrases that keep it all going, and everybody plays along. Imagine: Someone's pulling a gun, and you're jumping into the middle of it. You didn't think you'd feel this way.

There's a part in the movie where you can see right through the acting, where you can tell that I'm about to burst into tears

Hello darling, sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known.

These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn't haunted, it's owned by ghosts.

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You're in the eighth grade. You know these things.

So here we are again, words on a page, the voice that wants to be a hand, the bridge with no opposite side.