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Ink to paper, she is inventory, has a price tag. A piece to catalog.

She wags her index finger so furiously that I’m certain it will snap off.

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

How bright and eager they appear, how ready to get started.

Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

Some days it seems like enough to look in the glass for glazed relief.

I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.

Grant had a lot of buttons on that coat—when he wore it.

Then came “the sea of trouble” as he crumpled his bank statement.

He would sneak into my room, we would have sex, he would sneak out.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?

I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife.

Though I’ve never killed anything myself, I’ve been complicit.

I sensed that a name defined who I was and would be in the future.

We didn’t think of ourselves as anything so grand as sex workers.

In my sister’s memory, an old woman chased after the oranges.

Love is not something you wait for passively, but a practice.

The Great Gatsby had an awful, detrimental effect on me.

Love is the difference between a full life and an empty one.

I like to think of love as something that one should keep feeding, like a fire.

I’ve found that love has provided my life’s happiest moments.

A friend of my father’s once told me, “You’ll never be a writer.”

I once heard in a sermon, “Choose the important over the urgent.”

It’s best for my heart to have hours and hours each day to write.

Don’t write what you know. Write what you can imagine.

“The Sentry” taught me that all true laughter has tears behind it.

Every really good book on first reading is life changing.

I’m a big fan of then. A novel needs a lot of thens.