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"We are more than the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. All of us need to stop apologizing for having been to hell and come back breathing."

Clementine Von Radics, Broken

"Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street."

Frida Kahlo

"I must write sad poems about
how my heart is a chipped mug
or a wailing church organ
so that you nod and say,
Yes, and mine. And I must also
write happy poems about waking
with him like knotted rope
because things are good
more often than they are not."

Anna Meister, “Responsibility, an Arts Poetica”