Daphne Gottlieb

“There is nothinggoing on. I took nothingyou wanted. You can'thave it back.”

“Love - at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love - does not conquer all.”

“come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you didthis time i'll be ready i like it rough now and i'm done with romance i never met another man who loved me so much at first sight he had to hurt me to do it”

“you can take this mouththis wound you wantbut you can't kissand make itbetter.”

“All the black leathershe needsis the E-Z boy reclinerwhere her love is parkedwith one of his hands wrapped around a remote,the other, a bottle of beer.She's right. It's kinky.The way he doesn't look awayfrom the TV,as her head bobsin his laplike a fisherman's floaton a nature program,hecticwith the pacehis breath sets.His crotch swellsunder her mouth'sprowess. He's sucha sweethearthe waitsuntil thecommercialsto come.”

“I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.”

“I go through periods of not writing. Until there's something I can't find in the world that I need, so I write.”

“That's point of writing: building what you need, right?”

“I think that hope is the act of continuing in the face of the truth.”

“I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.”

“I go in and out of season. I won't write for months, and then all of a sudden, I'll write like I've got a fever.”

“This weekin live currentevents: your eyes.All power can bedangerous:Director alternating,you, socket to me.Plugged in and the gridis humming,this electricity,molecule-deep desire:particular friction, a chargestrong enough to stopa heartor start itagain; volt, re-volt--I shudder, I stutter, I startto life. I've got my ionyou, copper-top,so watch how youconduct yourself.Here's today'snewsflash: a battery of rollingblackouts in California, sudden,like lightning kisses:sudden, whitehotdarkness and you'rehere, fumbling forthat small switchwith an urgent surgestrong enough to killlesser machines.Static makes hair raise,makes things cling,makes things rise likea gathering stormcharging outsideour darkened houseand here I am:tempest, pouring outmouthfullsof tsunami on the ground,I've got that rain-soaked kite,that drenched key.You know what it's for,circuit-breaker, you knowhow to kiss until it's hertz.”

“I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.”

“I was 14 and madly in love for the first time. He was 21. He made me suddenly, unaccustomedly beautiful with his kisses and mix tapes. During the year of elation and longing, he never mentioned that he had a girlfriend who lived across the street.”

“Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.”

“As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion--she lost her head over it--we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope.”