Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again. - Anne Carson

There is no person without a world.

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

Three days
(so I hear)
she is without food,
keeps her body
pure of bread, longs to
run herself aground
in a sad secret death.

Is it a god inside you, girl?